Things and Stuff
The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction

With contributions from world-renowned researchers, this book delves into how to best describe the phenomena of mass-count distinction.

Tibor Kiss (Edited by), Francis Jeffry Pelletier (Edited by), Halima Husi? (Edited by)

9781108932820, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 August 2023

441 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.635 kg

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this book explores the relationship between mass and count nouns in a number of syntactic environments, and across a range of languages. It both explains how languages differ in their methods for describing these two fundamental categories of reality, and shows the many ways that modern linguistics looks to describe them. It also explores how the notions of count and mass apply to 'abstract nouns', adding a new dimension to the countability discussion. With its pioneering approach to the fundamental questions surrounding mass-count distinction, this book will be essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.

1. Editorial Introduction: Background to the Count-Mass Distinction Franics Jeffry Pelletier, Tibor Kiss and Halima Husi?
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 Husi?.

Subject Areas: Sign languages, Braille & other linguistic communication [CFZ], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Dialect, slang & jargon [CFFD], Linguistics [CF]