Description
Book SynopsisWith contributions from world-renowned scholars, this book explains how both modern linguistics and individual languages differ in their methods for describing two fundamental categories of reality: things and stuff. With its novel take on mass-count distinction, it is essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.
Table of Contents1. Editorial Introduction: Background to the Count-Mass Distinction Franics Jeffry Pelletier, Tibor Kiss and Halima Husić; 2. Mass vs Count: Where Do We Stand? Outline of a Theory of Semantic Variation Gennaro Chierchia; 3. Counting, Plurality and Portions Susan Rothstein; 4. Count/Mass Asymmetries: The Importance of Being Count Jenny Doetjes; 5. Divide and Counter Hagit Borer and Sarah Ouwayda; 6. Mass to Count Shifts in The Galilee Dialect of Palestinian Arabic Christine Hnout, Lior Laks and Susan Rothstein; 7. Object Mass Nouns as an Arbiter For The Mass/Count Category Kurt Erbach, Peter Sutton and Hana Filip; 8. Bare Nouns and the Mass-Count Distinction: A Pilot Study Across Languages Kayron Bevilaqua and Roberta Pires de Oliveira; 9. Counting (on) Bare Nouns: Revelations from American Sign Language Helen Koulidobrova; 10. Ontology, Number Agreement and the Mass-Count Distinction Alan Bale; 11. The Semantics of Distributed Number Myriam Dali and Éric Mathieu; 12. Container, Portion and Measure Interpretations of Pseudo-Partitive Peter Sutton and Hana Filip; 13. Overlap and Countability in Exoskeletal Syntax: A Best-Of-Both-Worlds Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction Hanna de Vries and George Tsoulas; 14. The Role of Context and Cognition in Countability: A Psycholinguistic Account of Lexical Distributions Francesca Franzon, Giorgio Arcara and Chiara Zanini; 15. Plurality Without (Full) Countability: On Mass- Like Categories in Lexical Plurals Constructions Peter Lauwers; 16. Determining Countability Classes Scott Grimm and Aeshaan Wahlang; 17. Polysemy and the Count/Mass Distinction: What Can We Derive from a Lexicon of Count and Mass Senses? Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Halima Husić.
