{"id":17663,"date":"2025-11-17T06:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T11:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17663"},"modified":"2025-11-16T22:05:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T03:05:33","slug":"elsewhere-11-20-james-cooper-roberts-mit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2025\/11\/17\/elsewhere-11-20-james-cooper-roberts-mit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Elsewhere 11\/20 -  James Cooper Roberts (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> James Cooper Roberts (MIT)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>Part is part (plus pragmatics)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Thursday, November 20th, 5pm - 6pm<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D769<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Abstract: <\/strong>In this work, I argue that the natural language item part (and its translational equivalents) is the same as the mereological notion of PROPER PART, full stop. While this seems trivially true, state-of-the-art semantics often assumes this is not the case; Link (1983) posits two parthood relations for part of an individual and part of a plurality (MATERIAL vs. ATOMIC parts), and those who assume one relation posit additional constraints on the transitivity of parthood (Moltmann, 1997; Wagiel, 2021). The latter is done in service of the observation that parts of atomic individuals seemingly cannot be part of a plurality. For example, a world where only Jerry Seinfeld&#8217;s hand is completely covered in paint is not a verifying case for (1).<\/p>\n<p>(1) Part of the New Yorkers are completely covered in paint.<\/p>\n<p>I will argue against the approaches outlined above, opting to instead include parts of atoms in the denotation of plural partitives. The interpretation we get for (1), I propose, is actually the result of pragmatics rather than semantics (Grice, 1975&#8217;s MAXIM OF QUANTITY). This position is bolstered by the fact that the &#8220;inclusive&#8221; reading of a plural partitive becomes available under negation and epistemic uncertainty (cf. plurals, Sauerland et al. 2005).<\/p>\n<p>[This is a practice talk for my upcoming presentation at OASIS 5.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: James Cooper Roberts (MIT) Title: Part is part (plus pragmatics) Time: Thursday, November 20th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: In this work, I argue that the natural language item part (and its translational equivalents) is the same as the mereological notion of PROPER PART, full stop. While this seems trivially true, state-of-the-art semantics [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17663"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17678,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17663\/revisions\/17678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}