27 November 2015, Cool Logic, Omer Korat

Different predicates give rise to different entailment patterns, both distributive and collective. Some predicates are ambiguous between distributive and collective readings. To complicate things further, in some cases two arguments of a predicate may be interpreted distributively: such readings are affected not only by the predicate, but also by the argument.

In this talk I present various entailment patterns which emerge as a result of properties of nominal expressions, and describe several attempts to derive these patterns in an algebraic (mereological) framework. Finally, I demonstrate where these analyses fail, and what may be a possible solution.

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