urgenteyextranjero
urgenteyextranjero
Originally uploaded by sararyan.
What occurred to me when I looked at this photo and its caption (Put your urgent foreign mail into this lion’s mouth) is that the use of AND here could be interpreted either with the distributive or collective reading: does the lion accept mail that is either urgent or foreign? Or does an individual piece of mail have to be both urgent and foreign for it to enter the mouth? The former reading is probably more likely, but ignoring for the moment VPs which *require* collective readings (gather, be numerous), it seems like the distributive reading tends to be preferred, ceteris paribus: ‘these letters are urgent and foreign’ seems to require that each letter be both urgent and foreign. Or perhaps my intuitions are shot to hell and I am completely wrong about this. I know this mereology stuff is oh so popular these days with the semantico-philosophy set, but it’s always seemed to me like something pragmatics should solve.