This paper develops a detailed and unified analysis of semantics of the from-N-to-N construction, based on a small number of ingredients, none of which are specific to this construction itself, but which are idiomatically packaged in this construction. Letting the construction uniformly apply to the product of the two nouns not only captures their strong relation, but it also obviates a role for a ‘reduplicative’ mechanism of some sort in this particular construction.

This paper presents a diagnostic for identifying distributive constructions and shows that it applies to pseudopartitives and for -adverbials. On this basis, a unified account is proposed for the parallels between the constructions involved. This account explains why for -adverbials reject telic predicates (*run to the store for five hours), why pseudopartitives reject count nouns (*five pounds of book ), and why both reject certain measure functions like temperature and speed (*30 of water, *drive for 5 mph). These restrictions all (...) follow from a general constraint on distributive constructions. Related concepts such as the D operator (Link, 1987), the subinterval property (Bennett and Partee, 1972), and divisive reference (Cheng, 1973) can be understood as formalizing special cases of this constraint. (shrink)

The traditional answer is: they must be atelic. But as we will see, this notion is imprecise. We will improve on it, without rejecting it. (Basically we’ll end up with temporally vs. spatially telic.).

Sentences like (1a)-(1d) have attracted the attention of a number of authors (Jackendoff 1990, Matsumoto 1996, Talmy 1996, Gawron 2005). Each has both an event reading and a stative reading. For example, on what I’ll call the event reading of sentence (1a), a body of fog beginning in the vicinity of the pier moves pointwards, and on the other, stative reading, which I’ll call an extent reading, the mass of fog sits over the entire region between pier and point. The (...) event reading entails movement. The extent reading entails extension, the occupation of a region of space. Similarly, there is a reading of (1b) describing a crack-widening event, as well as a reading describing the dimensions of the crack, increasing in width along an axis extending from the north tower to the gate; and readings of (c) and (d) describing movement events as well as readings describing the configuration of the storm front and the snow respectively. (shrink)