{"id":17994,"date":"2026-04-27T06:04:53","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T10:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17994"},"modified":"2026-04-26T22:58:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:58:31","slug":"lf-reading-group-4-29-lorenzo-pinton-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/04\/27\/lf-reading-group-4-29-lorenzo-pinton-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"LF Reading Group 4\/29 - Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><strong>Speaker:<\/strong> Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>Hurford Disjunctions without Entailment: A Mereological Approach<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Wednesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D461<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>I present part of my ongoing work on Hurford disjunctions and the role of parthood in meaning. In the first part of the talk, I introduce novel data showing that predicates vary systematically in how they interact with the Hurford Constraint. In particular, I show that while all predicates give rise to infelicity in Hurford-like sentences, many can be rescued by inserting\u00a0<i>just<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0<i>only<\/i>\u00a0in one of the disjuncts. This pattern resembles traditional scalar cases, but crucially arises even in the absence of an overt\u00a0<i>all<\/i>\u00a0in the other disjunct. I propose a typology that predicts when such rescue is possible: namely, in sentences containing predicates that universally quantify over parts of entities. More generally, I argue that all Hurford sentences can be rescued when universal quantification is introduced by some means, for instance via distribution over conjunction or through definite plurals.<\/p>\n<div>Building on these examples, and on recent observations by Amir Anvari, I argue that Hurford disjunctions are best understood in terms of mereological constraints on quantificational domains, rather than entailment relations\u0097entailment, on this view, emerges as a byproduct of parthood structure. In the second part of the talk, I sketch an account that captures these contrasts. The proposal combines a model without absolute atoms (following Magri 2008; and Sudo, 2025 (talk)) with a cognitively general no-overlap constraint on quantificational domains (Casati and Varzi, 1999;\u00a0Chatain and McHugh, 2025; a.o.).<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT) Title: Hurford Disjunctions without Entailment: A Mereological Approach Time: Wednesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 \u00a0 Abstract: I present part of my ongoing work on Hurford disjunctions and the role of parthood in meaning. In the first part of the talk, I introduce novel data showing that predicates vary [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994","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\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17994"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18019,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994\/revisions\/18019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}