Book contents
- Things and Stuff
- Things and Stuff
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors and their Affiliations
- Preface
- 1 Editorial Introduction: Background to the Count–Mass Distinction
- Large-Scale Architectures for Count and Mass
- Implications from Individual Languages
- 6 Mass-to-Count Shifts in the Galilee Dialect of Palestinian Arabic
- 7 Object Mass Nouns as an Arbiter for the Count–Mass Category
- 8 Bare Nouns and the Count–Mass Distinction: A Pilot Study Across Languages
- 9 Counting (on) Bare Nouns: Revelations from American Sign Language
- Compositional Analyses and Theoretical Issues
- New Empirical Approaches to the Semantics of the Count–Mass Distinction
- References
- Language Index
- Subject Index
6 - Mass-to-Count Shifts in the Galilee Dialect of Palestinian Arabic
from Implications from Individual Languages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
- Things and Stuff
- Things and Stuff
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors and their Affiliations
- Preface
- 1 Editorial Introduction: Background to the Count–Mass Distinction
- Large-Scale Architectures for Count and Mass
- Implications from Individual Languages
- 6 Mass-to-Count Shifts in the Galilee Dialect of Palestinian Arabic
- 7 Object Mass Nouns as an Arbiter for the Count–Mass Category
- 8 Bare Nouns and the Count–Mass Distinction: A Pilot Study Across Languages
- 9 Counting (on) Bare Nouns: Revelations from American Sign Language
- Compositional Analyses and Theoretical Issues
- New Empirical Approaches to the Semantics of the Count–Mass Distinction
- References
- Language Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The contribution of our paper is thus twofold. First, it documents the phenomenon of the singulative operation in the Galilee dialect of Palestinian Arabic. Second, we show that the singulative operator is predictably constrained in what nouns it applies to, and that the output of the operation varies depending on the properties of the denotation of the input noun - whether it denote liquids, granular substances, solid matter or a collection of individuals. To the best of our knowledge, while the singulative operation is recognized as part of Modern Standard Arabic grammar as well in at least some dialects, this kind of systematic semantic mapping between denotation of the input and denotation of the output has not yet been carried out before.
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- Things and StuffThe Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, pp. 151 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021