Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that objects are formally parallel to events in the way substances are formally parallel to processes. This chapter investigates whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. The authors of this chapter hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike for substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural but not mass language. The chapter investigates the language–perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations, designed either to encourage atomicity (‘natural’ breaks) or to discourage it (‘unnatural’ breaks). The experiments test preference for naming such stimuli with mass or count syntax. The results support Bach’s analogy in perception and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.
This book re-imagines the compositional semantics of comparative constructions with words like “more”. It argues for a revision of one of the fundamental assumptions of the degree semantics framework as applied to such constructions: that gradable adjectives do not lexicalize measure functions (i.e., mappings from individuals or events to degrees). Instead, the degree morphology itself plays the role of degree introduction. The book begins with a careful study of non-canonical comparatives targeting nouns and verbs, and applies the lessons learned there to those targeting adjectives and adverbs. A primary distinction that the book draws extends the traditional distinction between gradable and non-gradable as applied to the adjectival domain to the distinction between “measurable” and “non-measurable” predicates that crosses lexical categories. The measurable predicates, in addition to the gradable adjectives, include mass noun phrases, plural noun phrases, imperfective verb phrases, and perfective atelic verb phrases. In each of these cases, independent evidence for non-trivial ordering relations on the relevant domains of predication are discussed, and measurability is tied to the accessibility of such orderings. Applying this compositional theory to the core cases and beyond, the book establishes that the selection of measure functions for a given comparative depends entirely on what is measured and compared rather than which expression introduces the measurement
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