Counting Configurations

Abstract

The sentence With these three shirts and four pairs of pants, one can make twelve different outfits does not entail that one can dress twelve persons. The article proposes an analysis of “configurational” entities like outfits as individual concepts. It investigates the interaction of noun phrases based on such nouns with temporal and modal operators and in collective and cumulative interpretations. It also discusses a generalization from tokens to types, as in with the seven pieces of a tangram set, one can lay dozens of figures, suggesting an analysis of outfits and tangram figures in terms of properties.