Volume 41, Issue 3-4 - Stratified reference: the common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement

Why can I tell you that I ran for five minutes but not that I *ran to the store for five minutes ? Why can we talk about five pounds of books but not about *five pounds of book ? What keeps you from saying *sixty degrees Celsius of water when you can say sixty inches of water ? And what goes wrong when I complain that *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous ? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, distributivity, and collectivity. This paper provides a unified perspective on these domains and gives a single answer to the questions above in the framework of algebraic event semantics.

This is a reply to the comments by Corver, Doetjes, Link, Piñón, Schwarzschild, and Syrett on the target article in this volume, Stratified reference: The common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement . Stratified reference is designed to capture semantic oppositions involving atelicity, plurality and mass reference, extensive measure functions, distributivity, and collectivity. Following suggestions by some of the commentators, stratified reference is refined here in two ways: it is restricted to the parts of the event or individual in question, and its granularity parameter is instantiated with a predicate built around mereological proper parthood and degree ordering.