Parts and Wholes in Semantics

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.

• 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

This book is a very interesting one. It presents new and promising views of the count/plural/mass distinction, supporting them through extensive discussions of many phenomena. The basic idea - in singling out special entities which play a major role in accounting for count- and plural-like behaviour, according to contextually controllable integrity conditions - is challenging and with far-reaching consequences. Moreover, the breadth of coverage, and the attempts at discussing crosslinguistic and comparative evidence are worth particular notice.