November 16th: Mojmír Dočekal (Masaryk University) – Leiden

We are happy to announce that on Thursday, November 16th, Mojmír Dočekal (Masaryk university) will give an extra LUSH talk in Leiden. We hope to see you all there!

Date: Thursday, November 16th, 2017

Time: 13:15 – 14:45

Location: Leiden, Van Wijkplaats 2, room 003

Speaker: Mojmír Dočekal (Masaryk university), joint work with Marcin Wągiel

Title: Decomposing groups, bunches, and aggregates: Experimental evidence from derived collectives in West Slavic

Abstract:

Though the heterogeneous semantic nature of collective nouns has been known for a long time and keeps posing a challenge for a proper treatment, it was commonly assumed that collectives constitute a uniform category (e.g., Landman 1989, Barker 1992, Schwarzschild 1996). However, recent findings suggest that there are different types of such expressions (Pearson 2011, Henderson 2017). In this paper, we examine 3 classes of derived collectives in Czech and Polish: i) GROUP nouns, e.g., *rytíř*(CZ)/*rycerz*(PL) (`knight’) -> *rytířstvo*(CZ)/*rycerstwo*(PL) (`group/totality of knights’), ii) BUNCH numerals, e.g., *tři*(CZ)/*trzy*(PL) (`three’) -> *trojice*(CZ)/*trójka*(PL) (`group of three’), and iii) AGGREGATE nouns, e.g., *list*(CZ)/*liść*(PL) (`leaf’) -> *listí*(CZ)/*listowie*(PL) (`foliage’). Though all 3 classes involve collective inferences, they differ in a number of other properties, e.g., bunches are count whereas groups and aggregates are not. Unlike other classes, groups seem to have a generic flavor since they can combine with kind-level predicates. On the other hand, aggregates constitute clusters, i.e., spatial groupings involving topological relations (Grimm 2012), whereas groups and bunches do not seem to assert any spatial configurations. We investigate to what degree different modes of group-formation relate to decomposability of particular collective nouns. In this regard, we focus on the interaction between collectives and so-called A-*different* expressions such as *jiný*(CZ)/*inny*(PL) (`different’). In order to test the interaction of the 3 classes of collectives with A-*different* we designed parallel experiments on Czech and Polish where the acceptability of distributive inferences with collectives was tested. The talk presents the outcome of the experiment on the background of recent theories of plurality.