Linguistic individuals By Almerindo Ojeda (review)

588LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) of generative grammar. Generally, what contemporary generative grammar accomplishes by movement, H's approach accomplishes by deletion. There is much of interest in this book in addition to the development of a particular theory of linguistic form, including the analysis of sublanguages and the relation of natural language to mathematics and to music. However, the concluding paragraph of section 10.7, 'Non-linguistic systems; music', says something so outrageous that I am compelled to quote it in its entirety (318): 'Finally, it seems that the sign language ofthe deafdoes not have an explicit operator-argument partial ordering, nor an internal metalanguage, but rests upon a direct juxtaposition of the relevant referents. This applies to autonomous sign languages, developed by the deaf without instruction from people who know spoken language.' Lest there be any doubt about the implications of this paragraph, by 'internal metalanguage' Harris means the sentences which constitute the grammar of the language (359). REFERENCES Harris, Zellig. 1968. Mathematical structures of language. New York: Wiley-Interscience . ------. 1982. A grammar of English on mathematical principles. New York: Wiley-Interscience . ------. 1988. Language and information: The Bampton lectures in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Department of Linguistics[Received 30 March 1994.] Douglass Building 200 East University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 Linguistic individuals. By Almerindo Ojeda. (CSLI lecture notes, 31.) Stanford : Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1993. Pp. 205. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95. Reviewed by Kate Kearns, University of Canterbury Ojeda argues that the universe of discourse is a mereology structured by the relation of instantiation, this relation subsuming both the familiar relation of instantiation borne to a kind by its instances and the relation borne by quantities of a substance (such as water) to a larger quantity, possibly spatially scattered, of which they are parts—traditionally the 'part of relation of a mereology of solids. Ch. 2 (1A theory of linguistic individuals', 17-33) introduces the basic assumptions and definitions of the theory. Chs. 3-5 ('The semantics of countability G, 35-68; 'The semantics of countability ?G, 69-104; 'The semantics of uncountability', 105-47) explore the denotations of noun forms in detail, defined in terms of atomic, atomistic, and atomless individuals of the mereology. Atomic individuals are the 'true' individuals, having no instances other than themselves. Atomistic individuals are atomic or polyatomic, and atomless individuals are quantities of substances (or sums thereof) having no principle of individuation; they are therefore conceived of as infinitely divisible, and they REVIEWS589 have no atoms as instances—every instance of an atomless individual has in its turn proper instances. The stem and plural form of a count noun denote an atomistic domain, the domain of a kind being the set of its instances. The singular form is argued to be semantically marked although it is syntactically unmarked in the singular/ plural opposition, and it is defined in the same way as dual, trial, etc., number inflections and cardinal adjectives. For example, the singular inflection denotes a function selecting the atomic elements of each atomistic domain of the universe , and the singular inflected noun then denotes the intersection of the denotations of its parts, yielding the set of atoms of the kind denoted by the stem. The dual inflection and the adjective two denote a function selecting the diatoms of the universe, a diatom being the sum of two atoms, so the dual inflected noun or the form two N denotes the set of diatoms of the kind domain denoted by the stem. Mass nouns, as expected, primarily denote atomless domains. A further revision of the denotations of noun stems accounts for nondenoting nouns and the use of count nouns to denote proper kinds, including the secondary countable use of mass nouns as kind denoters. According to this strategy, every noun stem denotes a subdomain in the universe, where a subdomain is defined as a subset which is closed under complementation as well as under sum. The empty mereology is a subdomain of a kind domain, and thus available as the denotation of nondenoting nouns such as unicorn. Among the subdomains available as noun stem denotations are those in which nonoverlapping or...