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
7 - Object Mass Nouns as an Arbiter for the Count–Mass Category
from Implications from Individual Languages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
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
Summary
Chierchia (2010) argues that object mass nouns constitute a good testing ground for theories of the mass/count distinction, given that these nouns constitute a non-canonical type of mass noun that seems to be restricted to number marking languages (excluding outliers like Greek which admit plural morphology on mass nouns). Taking this idea as a springboard, in this paper, we pose the questions: Are there object mass nouns in classifier languages such as Japanese? What does the answer to this question mean for semantic accounts of the mass/count distinction in classifier languages?
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- Chapter
- Information
- Things and StuffThe Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, pp. 167 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021