Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials

AbstractThe multiword adverbials N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM (as English “brick by brick” and “one by one”, respectively) are event modifiers which require temporal sequencing of the event they modify into a linearly ordered series of sub-events. Previous studies unified these two constructions under a single semantic analysis and adopted either a mereological or a scalar approach. However, based on a corpus study examining new Slavic language material and a binomial logistic regression modelling of the manually annotated data, we argue that two separate analyses are needed to account for these constructions, namely a scalar analysis for the N-BY-N construction and a mereological one for the NUM-BY-NUM construction.