[PLing] Talk @ CEU-Language Lab- Marcin Wągiel- Jan 23

[Natalia Jardon Perez]

Dear All,

The Language Comprehension Lab cordially invites you to the following talk by:

Marcin Wągiel (Masaryk University in Brno & University of Wrocław)

Date: Tuesday, January 23
Time: 14:00
Venue: Language Comprehension Lab (D513)

Title: "Simplex and complex events: Cross-linguistic inquiry into event-external/internal quantification”

Abstract: A sentence such as *Kim knocked on the door three times* is ambiguous between an event-external interpretation (quantification over so-called `occasions') and an event-internal interpretation (quantification over so-called `acts' within a single occasion) (e.g., Cusic 1981, Andrews 1983, Cinque 1999). In *Kim knocked on the door three times twice*, the sentence-final *twice* unambiguously quantifies event-externally, whereas *three times* unambiguously counts individual knocks within each knocking series. Interestingly, Polish, Mandarin Chinese and Hungarian mark the distinction between occasions and acts formally via dedicated multiplicatives, distinct verbal classifiers and the (non)-occurrence of the accusative case (e.g., Donazzan 2013, Zhang 2017), respectively. Still, the relationship between the two postulated categories remains unclear since both seem to fall into the ontological class of eventualities. In this talk, I argue that the event-external/internal distinction receives a straightforward explanation once mereotopological notions are extended to the domain of events. Mereotopology assumes parthood (the mereological component) and connectedness (the topological component) as key notions governing the internal structure of entities (Casati & Varzi 1999). As a result, it allows for distinguishing between units and structured configurations thereof, which can nonetheless be conceptualized as higher-order entities. Building on the mereotopological theory of time by Mazzola (2019), I propose that event-internal interpretations concern quantification over simplex singular eventualities within a single cluster, whereas event-external readings concern counting different clusters of events (see also Landman 2004, Henderson 2017). The results suggest that at least some aspects of the mechanism of individuation utilized for numeric quantification in natural language are uniform in both the nominal and verbal domain, and thus apply to both individuals and events.

-----------------------------------
This will be an in-person talk. For those unable to join us at CEU, here’s the zoom link:
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/5587032528?pwd=T2lsS3pUd0RmRzBIbE9OVlBUVDVJdz09&omn=82692272015
Meeting ID: 558 703 2528
Passcode: 7zF5Ae


Kind regards,
Natalia Jardón


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20240118/c887e79a/attachment.html>