Stratified reference: the common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement

Abstract

Why can I tell you that I 'ran for five minutes' but not that I *'ran to the store for five minutes'? Why can we talk about 'five pounds of books' but not about *'five pounds of book'? What keeps you from saying *'sixty degrees Celsius of water' when you can say 'sixty inches of water'? And what goes wrong when I complain that *'all the ants in my kitchen are numerous'? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, distributivity, and collectivity. This paper provides a unified perspective on these domains and gives a single answer to the questions above in the framework of algebraic event semantics.