Referentiality, individuation and incompletive readings
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Referentiality, individuation and incompletive readings Anqi Zhang1 Received: 30 December 2019 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 / Published online: 2 December 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract As an exception to Krifka’s (in: Bartsch, Benthem, Emde Boas,Semantics and contextual expression, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1989) famous generalization that a quantized incremental theme always induces an event-homomorphic completive reading, Singh (Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17(1): 469–479, 1991, Journal of East Asian Linguistics 3(2): 107–146, 1998) observes that in Hindi only quantized mass noun phrases entail a completive reading, but unexpectedly quantized count noun phrases can give rise to an incompletive reading. She proposes that count nouns can introduce a partial-affectedness thematic relation, whereas mass nouns introduce a total-affectedness thematic relation. With new data in Mandarin, instead of the count/mass distinction, I argue that referentiality of the direct object is a crucial factor, because incompletive readings are only felicitous with direct objects interpreted referentially for consumption verbs in Mandarin. Keywords Referentiality · Individuation · Atomicity · Incompletive readings · Incremental-theme
1 Introduction As is well known, the telicity of a verbal predicate often depends on the properties of its direct object (Verkuyl 1972; Dowty 1979; Tenny 1992; Bach 1986; Krifka 1989a, 1998, among others). When the direct object is a bare plural or mass noun, the predicate becomes an activity, as diagnosed by standard tests with for-phrases and in-phrases as in (1a). In contrast, when the direct object is a count noun with a numeral as in (1b), the predicate behaves like an accomplishment with respect to the same tests. (1)
B 1
a. I ate apples/bread for two hours/*in two hours. b. I ate three apples *for two hours/in two hours.
Anqi Zhang [email protected] School of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Road, Qixia District, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China
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In his classic mereological account, Krifka (1989a; 1998) analyzes this variable telicity pattern in terms of an event-object homomorphism. For gradual predicates, such as verbs of creation and consumption, all the parts of an event are homomorphically mapped to the parts of an entity denoted by the direct object, consequently inheriting the boundedness of the NP. Krifka (1989a) models boundedness as a property called quantization, and the opposite cumulativity. Basically, an NP predicate is quantized if it cannot be applied to the sum of two individuals that it is true of as in (2a), whereas an NP predicate is cumulative if it can apply to the sum of two entities that it is true of as in (2b). (2)
a. ∀P[QU A S (P) ↔ ∀x∀y[P(x) ∧ P(y) → ¬y ⊂s x]] b. ∀P[CU M S (P) ↔ ∀x∀y[P(x) ∧ P(y) → P(x ∪s y)]] Krifka (1989a, 89)
Under these definitions, quantized NPs include NPs with a numeral and definites, whereas cumulative NPs include bare mass nouns and bare plurals. For ex
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