Systematic polysemy and the count-mass distinction*

This paper investigates the type of systematic sense alternation that rests on the count-mass distinction in English. Computational semantic approaches often suggest treating such sense alterations as being generated on the basis of a set of lexical inference rules, yielding, for instance, for an animal-denoting term, a meat sense ( ̳We‘re having rabbit for dinner‘), a fur sense ( ̳Annie is wearing rabbit‘), and a general ̳stuff‘ sense ( ̳After a tractor had run over the body, there was rabbit splattered all over the yard‘). I question this rule-based account on the basis that it doesn‘t provide the interpretive flexibility required to account for the data, and argue that, although the sense alternations in question clearly have a linguistic component, pragmatics is playing a crucial role in giving rise to such sense alternations. I propose an alternative analysis, where the countmass distinction is seen as a primarily conceptual-ontological distinction being reflected in a syntactic distinction at the level of NPs (rather than as a property of nouns). On this account, count-mass syntax provides an instruction to the pragmatic system that the concept encoded by the NP should be construed as denoting either an individual or an unindividuated entity. On the basis of such underspecified inputs, highly activated encyclopaedic and logical information associated with the concept, and contextual assumptions derived from the utterance situation, the relevance-optimising pragmatic system operates to yield the speaker-intended concept.