Individuation of eventualities and abstract things

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Hana Filip
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 436992780

The main focus of this project is on abstract Ns (“thought”, “satisfaction”) and verbal predicates of eventualities (“cross (the Rhine)”, “sleep”). Although both can be straightforwardly used in counting constructions, for instance, they differ from concrete Ns in how entities in their denotation are identified and individuated. Intuitively, spatiotemporal criteria serve as a key factor in the individuation of physical objects denoted by concrete Ns. However, the identification/individuation of eventualities in the denotation of verbal predicates conceptually depends on certain parameters of eventualities, such as physical properties of their participants, temporal traces, locations and the like (inspired by Strawson 1959, Davidson 1969/1980, Krifka 1989 i.a.). The relation of abstract Ns to space-time is mysterious, and given that the class of abstract Ns is highly heterogeneous, identifying an overarching feature that accounts for just what makes an abstract N count, or mass, seems an elusive goal. The present project is couched within a formal (compositional) mereotopo-logical theory developed by Filip and Sutton, which focused on the mass/count distinction in the domain of concrete Ns. The guiding idea for the present project is that what is ‘one’ for the purposes of counting in the denotation of verbal predicates and abstract Ns relies on the anchoring of their denotata to parameters of (episodic and stative) eventualities, e.g., temporal traces and participants, which can be characterized in terms of mereotopological properties (such as disjointness, quantization, granularity). This presupposes that our compositional semantics combines lexical semantic representations with ‘perspectives’ on what counts as ‘one’ in a given context, modulo general world knowledge. Additional constraints arise from the syntax-semantics interface, also be governed by language-specific grammatical features. One novel outcome of this project is to provide a link in the individuation and counting criteria of verbal predicates and abstract Ns to the core principles of individuation and counting of concrete Ns, which is something that so far nobody has done in a systematic way, to the best our knowledge. Moreover, virtually all theories of the mass/count distinction are based on concrete Ns, given that abstract Ns are deemed mostly intractable. In doing so, we explore our main question: Is a unified cross-categorial analysis of countability viable, and if so, what semantic theory best supports it? The answer should ultimately further our understanding of the central role of counting and measuring in cognition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Scott Grimm, Ph.D.; Professor Jeff Pelletier, Ph.D.