"The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing)"--.

• Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Introduction
  • 1. The syntactic mass-count distinction
  • 2. Approaches to the semantic mass-count distinction
  • 3. Numeral classifiers
  • 4. Contributions in this volume
  • References
• Re-examining the mass-count distinction
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Prototypical mass-count and classifier languages
    • 2.1 English: A mass-count language
    • 2.2 Mandarin: A classifier language
  • 3. Moving away from the prototypes
    • 3.1 Western Armenian
    • 3.2 Ch’ol and Mi’gmaq
    • 3.3 The case against parameters
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
• Activewear and other vaguery
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The mass-count distinction – basic concepts
  • 3. Aggregate-mass – basic properties and distribution
  • 4. Aggregate-mass nouns: Internal membership criteria
  • 5. Morphological aspects
    • 5.1 English derivational patterns
    • 5.2 French derivational patterns
    • 5.3 Hebrew derivational patterns
  • 6. Discussion
  • Anchor 225
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• A comparison of abstract and concrete mass nouns in terms of their interaction with quantificational determiners
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Data to be accounted for
    • 2.1 Vague quantificational determiners
    • 2.2 Specificity markers
  • 3. Vague quantificational determiners and abstract mass nouns: The analysis
    • 3.1 Background: Gradable adjectives and the nouns derived from them
    • 3.2 The analysis
  • 4. Specificity markers and mass nouns: The analysis
    • 4.1 Background
    • 4.2 The analysis
  • 5. Conclusion
  • References
• Can mass-count syntax be derived from semantics?
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Statistical analysis of cross-linguistic distribution of mass and count nouns
    • 2.1 Data collection and distance distribution from pure count nouns
    • 2.2 Entropy and mutual information measures
  • 3. Network modelling
    • 3.1 Methods
    • 3.2 Results: Classification of markers
    • 3.3 Results: Categorization of nouns
    • 3.4 The syntax-semantics interaction
  • 4. Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix A
    • Semantic questions
• Countability and grammatical number
  • 1. Grammatical numbers as government classes
  • 2. Further grammatical numbers: The universal and the co-universal
  • 3. Interpreting the categories of grammatical number: A first pass
  • 4. Models for the interpretation of grammatical number
  • 5. The semantics of grammatical number: A Platonic view
  • 6. The semantics of grammatical number: An Aristotelian view
  • 7. The collective numbers
  • 8. The conceptional neuter
  • 9. Challenges for the Aristotelian view
  • References
• Comparatives in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 1. Bale and Barner (2009)
  • 2. Brazilian Portuguese bare singular
  • 3. Naturally atomic (object) mass nouns in English
  • 4. Hungarian
  • 5. Theoretical analysis
  • 6. Flexible nouns: English and Brazilian Portuguese
  • 7. Summary
  • References
• Lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic sources of countability
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Lexical and syntactic sources of countability
    • 2.1 Early experimental studies of the mass-count distinction: Objects and substances
    • 2.2 Quantification over individuals and mass-count asymmetry: Evidence for lexical and syntactic sources of individuation
    • 2.3 Conceptual and pragmatic sources of countability
  • 3. Conclusions
  • References
• Countability shifts and abstract nouns
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 The grammar of countability
  • 2. Countability: lexicon or cognition?
  • 3. Countability shifts
  • 4. Going abstract
    • 4.1 Ways to be abstract
    • 4.2 Abstract nouns and kinds
    • 4.3 Gradedness in abstract nouns
  • 5. A BECL-based review of mass-count shifts with abstract nouns
  • 6. Conclusions
• Name Index
• Subject Index