Cumulativity

In linguistic semantics, an expression X is said to have cumulative reference if and only if the following holds: If X is true of both of a and b, then it is also true of the combination of a and b. For example, the English word "water" has cumulative reference, since if two separate entities can be said to be "water", then combining them into one entity will yield more "water". On the other hand, two separate entities which each are "a house" do not combine to form "a house". Hence, the expression "a house" does not have cumulative reference. The plural form "houses", however, does have cumulative reference. If two (groups of) entities are both "houses", then their combination will still be "houses".

Cumulativity has proven relevant to the linguistic treatment of the mass/count distinction and for the characterization of grammatical telicity.

Formally, a cumulative predicate Template:Mvar can be defined as follows, where capital Template:Mvar is a variable over sets, Template:Mvar is the universe of discourse, Template:Mvar is a mereological part structure on Template:Mvar, and ${\oplus }_p$ is the mereological sum operation.

$$(\mathrm{\forall }X\subseteq U_p)(CUM(X)⟺\mathrm{\exists }x,y(X(x)\wedge X(y)\wedge x\ne y)\wedge \mathrm{\forall }x,y(X(x)\wedge X(y)\Rightarrow X(x{\oplus }_{p}y)))$$

In later work, Krifka has generalized the notion to Template:Mvar-ary predicates, based on the phenomenon of cumulative quantification. For example, the two following sentences appear to be equivalent:

John ate an apple and Mary ate a pear.

John and Mary both ate both a pear and an apple.

This shows that the relation "eat" is cumulative. In general, an Template:Mvar-ary predicate Template:Mvar is cumulative if and only if the following holds:

$$(\mathrm{\forall }{x}_1,\dots ,x_n,y_1,\dots ,y_n)(R(x_1,\dots ,x_n)\wedge R(y_1,\dots ,y_n))\to R(x_1\oplus y_1,\dots ,x_n\oplus y_n)$$

References

• Krifka, Manfred (1989). "Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics". In Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem and Peter van Emde Boas (eds.), Semantics and Contextual Expressions 75–115. Dordrecht: Foris.
• Krifka, Manfred. 1999. "At least some denominators aren’t denominators". In The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view, ed. K. Turner, 257–291. North-Holland: Elsevier Science.
• Scha, Remko. 1981. "Distributive, collective, and cumulative quantification". In Formal methods in the study of language, ed. T. Janssen and M. Stokhof, 483–512. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre Tracts.