Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability

Formal semantic treatments of nominal reference have focused on natural kind nouns (Carlson 1980, Krifka et al. 1995), yet as has been widely recognized by anthropologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and others, artifacts (cup, furniture, chair) and natural kinds (dog, water, flower) differ critically in nature. We argue that these differences have important consequences for how artifact nouns establish reference, as well as for other fundamental nominal properties of central interest to the formal semantic enterprise, such as countability. Our analysis also sheds light on a key puzzle in the countability literature: why are artifact nouns such as furniture or mail, which seem to have individual entities in their denotation (Barner & Snedeker 2005), non-countable at both the objectand kind-level? In this paper we develop semantic representations for artifact nouns intended to capture their unique (semantic) properties. The starting point for our analysis is the proposal that while a natural kind is characterized by some often ineffable “natural essence”, an artifact is usually characterized by an intended function, e.g. writing for the noun pencil, sewing for the noun needle, or furnishing for the noun furniture. This proposal receives support from observations that to the extent that the name of an entity may be semantically transparent, the names of natural kinds reflect their essence, while those of artifacts reflect their function. Thus, following Nichols (2008), we argue that the meaning of an artifact noun includes an ‘associated event’, often representing the artifact’s intended function; yet, a certain flexibility in the way such nouns may be used to refer to entities suggests that their meaning may also involve (sub-lexical) modality or temporal components. The next section develops our semantics for artifact nouns in detail. Section 3 examines the consequences of our account for countability, explaining the non-countability of artifact nouns such as furniture at both the objectand kind-level.