Abstract
Our focus in this section will be on the difference in the variety of entities that the sets and the union approaches are committed to. In order to study this question, we need to have a way of characterizing variety and of testing for its activity in the grammar. We will start with the idea that the variety of a set of objects is established by dividing that set into different categories. If a semantic theory posits a domain of entities having a wide variety of entities in it, and if this variety is really relevant to the grammar, then it should make reference to the categories into which the domain is divisible. For example, a predicate may apply felicitously only to entities of a certain category.
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Reference
This section owes much to Dougherty (1970).
This information was provided me by Karen Petronio. The verbal inflection “exhaustive” is discussed in Klima E. and U. Bellugi, 1979, The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
Link(to appear:20) makes a similar point.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Schwarzschild, R. (1996). Sorting the Domain. In: Pluralities. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2704-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2704-4_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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