Parts and Wholes in Semantics

This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole" in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.

I. - Introduction
II. - The Formal Semantic Framework and the Treatment of Distributivity
III. - Semantic Selection, Part Structures, and Perspectives
IV. - Part Structures and Quantification
V. - Metrical and Other Lexical Specifications of Part Structures
VI. - Dimensions of Parts and Wholes and the Part Structure of Events
VII. - The Mass-Count Distinction for Verbs and Adverbial Quantification over Events
VIII. - Concluding Remark about Part Structures and Natural Language

Friederike Moltmann is senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She had previously taught both linguistics and philosophy at various universities in the US and the UK. She has published numerous articles in both linguistic and philosophical journals.