Speaker: James Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: Part is part (plus pragmatics)
Time: Thursday, November 20th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: In this work, I argue that the natural language item part (and its translational equivalents) is the same as the mereological notion of PROPER PART, full stop. While this seems trivially true, state-of-the-art semantics often assumes this is not the case; Link (1983) posits two parthood relations for part of an individual and part of a plurality (MATERIAL vs. ATOMIC parts), and those who assume one relation posit additional constraints on the transitivity of parthood (Moltmann, 1997; Wagiel, 2021). The latter is done in service of the observation that parts of atomic individuals seemingly cannot be part of a plurality. For example, a world where only Jerry Seinfeld’s hand is completely covered in paint is not a verifying case for (1).
(1) Part of the New Yorkers are completely covered in paint.
I will argue against the approaches outlined above, opting to instead include parts of atoms in the denotation of plural partitives. The interpretation we get for (1), I propose, is actually the result of pragmatics rather than semantics (Grice, 1975’s MAXIM OF QUANTITY). This position is bolstered by the fact that the “inclusive” reading of a plural partitive becomes available under negation and epistemic uncertainty (cf. plurals, Sauerland et al. 2005).
[This is a practice talk for my upcoming presentation at OASIS 5.]