Entities, events, and their parts : The semantics of multipliers in Slavic

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Authors

WĄGIEL Marcin

Year of publication 2020
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Current Developments in Slavic Linguistics. Twenty Years After (based on selected papers from FDSL 11)
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web Webové stránky publikace
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-07147-4
Keywords multipliers; subatomic quantification; counting; mereology; atomicity
Description In this chapter, I present novel data concerning quantification in the adjectival domain. I examine semantic properties of Slavic multipliers such as Polish podwójny, Czech dvojitý, Russian dvojnoj, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian dvostruki (all ‘double’) which seem to involve what I call subatomic quantification. Unlike cardinal numerals, multipliers do not count entities or events, but rather their particular parts. Since Slavic multipliers are derivationally complex, I argue that they are in fact compositional. Building on the system of Krifka (1989, 1990, and 1995), I propose an analysis which accounts for a representative subset of data. The main claim is that in Slavic numeral roots simply denote numbers whereas specialized morphemes restrict the domain of quantification by introducing a special measure function yielding a number of self-sufficient parts, i.e., elements which have a property of a whole, constituting an individual or event denoted by a noun.
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