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5 - Extending the system – quantity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Rochelle Lieber
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Summary

I turn next to a set of features that I will characterize roughly as having to do with quantity, by which I mean notions pertaining to duration, internal individuation, and boundaries. Here, I tread carefully on much-traveled ground: the subject of the quantitative characteristics of substances/things/essences and situations has been much discussed in both the philosophical literature and the linguistic literature at least since the 1970s. It is intimately connected with the vast literature on the Vendler (1967) classes of predicates (States, Activities, Accomplishments, and Achievements), and with discussions of telicity, terminativity, delimitedness, and measuring out which have figured prominently in the work of Verkuyl (1972, 1989, 1993, 1999), Dowty (1979), Tenny (1987, 1994), Jackendoff (1991, 1996), Pustejovsky (1991), Smith (1997), Tenny and Pustejovsky (2000), among many others.

In this chapter, I will pursue the idea that the quantitative semantics of lexical nouns and verbs can be characterized by a small set of semantic features, and indeed by the same small set of semantic features. I'm not original here; this is an idea which has had wide currency at least since the 1980s, figuring in such works as Carlson (1981), Bach (1986), and Jackendoff (1991, 1996), among others in the linguistic and philosophical literature. As will become apparent shortly, my account owes a great deal to the work of all of these researchers.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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