There is Overlap in Letters: A Mereological Definition of Word Types

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 04-2022
Journal Synthese
Article number 178
Volume | Issue number 200 | 2
Number of pages 17
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract Classical mereology seems unable to characterise the identity conditions of word types. For example, the same letter types ordered differently result in different word types; but mereological fusions of the same letters are identical, regardless of the order of the letters. We show, however, that by combining classical mereology with plural logic one can give a definition of word types that satisfies the identity criteria of word types. This means that it is not necessary to abandon classical mereology in order to give an analysis of the mereological structure of word types.
Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03664-4
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s11229-022-03664-4 (Final published version)
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