Fall 2024 

BCL, Université Côte d'Azur

Time:

Changed time: Wednesdays 16.30h-18.30h, starting October 23, 2024

Room: 005, Campus St Angely

This course will be given as a hybrid course, at both a relatively introductory and an advanced level.

Auditors welcome!

ZOOM link:

https://univ-cotedazur.zoom.us/j/88648666250?pwd=qOmbQ2iJRccGaUFCL1Aj0yXDbZszYR.1

Program and syllabus

Description:

The course will give an overview of notions of part-whole structure (mereology) that have particularly good applications to natural language, distinguishing extensional mereological theories (Link and related work) and integrity-based approaches (Aristotle, Langacker, Moltmann). It will discuss my own 1997 theory of situated part structure and ist specific motivations, which applies conditions of maximal connectedness to particular situations. It will also discuss the limits of merology for semantic analysis, concerning the notion of a single object and phenomena that have motivated plural reference (reference to several individuals at once) for the semantics of plurals.

The course will discuss existing literature and well as new emptical generalizations and theoretical ideas. It will involve some invited presentations in December.

Sessions

October 23:

General introduction: part-whole structure in ontology and part-whole in the semantics of natural language; motivations for using mereology in semantics; challenges foir the mereological approach.  Handout 

October 30:

Extensional mereology and its limits  Handout

November 6:

Integrity-based approaches to part-whole structure 1: historical views (Aristotle's notion of form, the form-matter debate in philosophy). A new application of the notion of integrated wole: the semantics of completion-related verbs of absence (be missing, lack)  Handout

November 16: no class

November 20:

Integrity-based approaches to part-whole structure 2: extensional mereological views of part-whole structure and the theory of situated part structures. Handout

November 27:

The mass-count distinction: extensional mereological views and the view of Langacker  Handout

December 4:

Limits of mereology for semantic analysis: motivations for plural reference  Handout

The course will be followed by a colloquium co-organized with the University of Lille with invited speakers and contributed talks on January 23-24, 2025

Note about my own interests:

Part-whole structure has always been important for my own work. My book Parts and Wholes in Semantics (OUP 1997) and a number of papers (1989-2005) had introduced the Aristotelian notion of an integrated whole into semantic theory, as part of a theory of situated part structures. This was novel at a time when extensional mereological theories of plurals and mass nouns (Link and others) were considered the only option. More recently I have also pursued the notion of plural reference, reference to several things at once, as an alternative to a mereological semantics of plurals, and I have become interested in alternatives to mereological analysis to mass nouns, which avoid treating their denotations as single things.