The Acquisition of Ontological Categories: the Mass Nouns Issue

This paper explores the properties of mass and count nouns in child language. Results from experimental research with English speaking children are compared with an analysis of the spontaneous speech production of Italian-speaking children. It is argued that children exposed to Italian and English as young as two know that the target grammar distinguishes between count and mass nouns. Their knowledge however is not fully adultlike: nouns still have to be classified as mass or count. In the classification process, distribution plays a major role. Syntactic properties guide the child in classifying nouns as mass or count. Semantic and perceptual properties play a minor role but can be used by the child in absence of distributional evidence. Introduction This paper is concerned with the distinction between mass and count nouns in child language. First we describe the main properties of mass nouns, then we briefly outline Chierchia’s theory. The third and the fourth section investigate how the distinction is acquired: we will comment on the spontaneous speech of three Italian children and the experiments and the analysis conducted by Gordon (1982, 1985, 1988) and Gathercole (1986). The last section provides the conclusions. 1 Empirical Properties of Count and Mass Nouns Let us list the most important properties of mass nouns. Mass and count nouns show different syntactic and semantic properties. We begin with the major distributional properties. The first property we need to consider is plural morphology: count nouns have a singular and a plural form, while mass nouns have only one morphological form. (1) a. I want sandwiches. b. *I want waters. The second property is related to determiners. Consider the following examples: 1 On this topic see Pelletier (1979) and Pelletier and Schubert (1987). 2 Obviously, we do not mean that mass nouns do not have a different morphological form. What is important is that they cannot occur in plural contexts, for example as subjects of plural verbs. Even if this is the most clear difference between count and mass nouns, a caveat is necessary: plural forms of mass nouns are not ungrammatical. As the universal grinder described by Pelletier (1977) shows, it is always possible to use a mass noun as count and vice versa, but such uses are special or marked; nouns can occur in any grammatical context, but they prefer one context over the other.