The grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns in Mandarin Chinese

The Count-Mass Distinction of Abstract Nouns in Mandarin Chinese

The issue of whether nouns in Mandarin Chinese can be distinguished into count and mass nouns has been debated in recent literature. Unlike English, Mandarin Chinese is a language where nouns are not obviously count nouns or mass nouns. In fact, syntactically nouns in Mandarin are similar to mass nouns in English, as they cannot combine directly with numerals, but must combine with classifiers;...

Count Nouns – Mass Nouns Neat Nouns – Mess Nouns

In this paper I propose and formalize a theory of the mass-count distinction in which the denotations of count nouns are built from non-overlapping generators, while the denotations of mass nouns are built from overlapping generators. Counting is counting of generators, and it will follow that counting is only correct on count denotations. I will show that the theory allows two kinds of mass no...

Quantification and the Count-Mass Distinction in Mandarin Chinese

Classifiers Are for Numerals, Not for Nouns: Consequences for the Mass-count Distinction*

In classifier languages, nouns must appear with one of a series of classifiers in order to be modified by a numeral. This squib presents new data from Mi’gmaq (Algonquian) and Chol (Mayan), arguing that classifiers are required due to the syntactic and semantic properties of the numeral (as in Krifka 1995), rather than the noun (as in Chierchia 1998). The results are shown to have important con...

Individuation and Quantification: Do bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese individuate?

Some have proposed that speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, have to rely on classifiers for acquiring individuated meanings of nouns (e.g., Borer 2005; Lucy 1992). This paper examines this view by looking at how Mandarin adults interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in three experiments. Experiment 1 fou...