Slices of meaning: a study of nouns of portions

Abstract

Within the framework of the analysis of Part-Whole relations the cases of nouns of portions (such as slice) is studied. In preliminary sections, a corpus of Spanish of these kind of words is displayed, and several approaches to the issue are summarised. Then, syntactic and semantic analyses are set which lead to posit that Portion Nouns are not common nouns but complex grammatical objects sharing properties of nouns, specifiers, operators and predicators thus they might no longer be treated as nouns but as a special class of operators on NPs. Consequently, Portion-Whole relation should not be treated as other types of Part-Whole relations -usually represented in lexicons by means of links between nouns. Meaning components of Portion Nouns are discussed, resulting on a general taxonomy of portion terms grounded in cognitive distinctions. Finally, a representation of the most representative cases, making use of concepts coming from Cognitive Grammar, Ray Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics, and Pustejovsky's Theory of Qualia is outlined.