Parts and Wholes in Semantics

This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of part and whole in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals mass nouns adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole together and alone nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations perspectives and dimensions.