In 1936, Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote a justly famous paper entitled "An American Indian Model of the Universe" (Carroll, 1956). In that paper, Whorf criticized the easy assumption that people in different cultures, speaking radically different languages, share common presuppositions about what the world is like. He contrasted the Hopi view of space and time with what he called elsewhere the Standard Average European view. For the Hopi, space and time are inherently relativistic; for the speaker of Western European languages, (...) like English, the universe is basically Newtonian, time and space are absolute, "containers" of things and events. (shrink)

Argues against a Gillon-style covers-based analysis of plural noun phrases.

Argues for an assimilation of sentential and predicate conjunction to collective conjunction, based on modification of predicates by adverbs such as 'alternately'.

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework. It begins by reviewing options for treating the alternation between `collective' and `distributive' readings of sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases, including analyses from both the modern and the premodern literature. It is argued that plural and conjoined noun phrases are unambiguously group-denoting, and that the collective/distributive distinction therefore must be located in the predicates with which these noun phrases combine. More (...) specifically, predicates must have a hidden argument place for events; the collective/distributive distinction may then be represented in the part/whole structure of these events. This allows a natural treatment of `collectivizing' adverbial expressions, and of `pluractional' affixes; it also allows a unified semantics for conjunction, in which conjoined sentences and predicates denote groups of events, much like conjoined noun phrases denote groups of individuals. (shrink)

Argues that certain conditional clauses are irreducibly adnominal, so that 'if' cannot be treated purely as a sentential connective. A unified analysis of adnominal if-clauses and ordinary if-clauses is possible, however, if we assume a semantic theory in which sentences denote sets of events rather than truth values.

Presents a unified semantics for various readings of 'together', using event mereology.