Seminaire Labex PLU - s éance du 9 février

[martadonazzan]

Chers tous,

nous vous rappelons que la prochaine séance du séminaire Labex PLU aura lieu le
***jeudi 9 février**
 de 14h00 à 16h00, dans le locaux de l'UFR de Linguistique, 175
rue du Cheveleret, 4ème étage plateau C, salle 4C92 ("Aquarium").

 Giorgio Magri nous presentera la suite de son exposé du 2 février:
 "Collective nouns without groups"
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin presentera ses commentaires sur ce travail.



 ABSTRACT:
 This paper argues that collective terms (such as that pack of dogs or that pile of dishes) and the corresponding individual terms (i.e. those dogs and  those dishes) denote the same individual; in other words, that a morphologically singular collective term denotes a plural individual. This"coreferentiality hypothesis" is the null hypothesis, since it doesn't  require any enrichment of the ontology with new individuals, such as Link's (1984) "impure atoms", Landman's (1989a) "groups" or Schwarzschild's (1996) "bunches". The argument in favor of this coreferentiality hypothesis is  twofold. On the one hand, I note that the replacement of a collective term
 with the corresponding individual term (and vice versa) most often doesn't  affect neither truth-conditions nor grammaticality, even in cases of  distributive predication. As distributive predication is peculiar to plural-denoting terms, a collective term should therefore denote a plural individual. On the other hand, I show how to account under this coreferentiality hypothesis for some linguistic evidence that at first sight seems to point against it. I consider two such linguistic facts: predicate non-sharing between a collective term and the corresponding individual term and the special behavior of collective terms with reciprocals. The apparent paradox of a morphologically singular collective term denoting a plural individual is resolved with a new semantics for number morphology.





 Bien cordialement

 Marta et Carmen





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