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; they do not have singular/plural morphology , and the same quantifier occurs with nouns that denote individuals and nouns that denote non-individuals. To date, there have been two views on the status of nouns in Chinese. In the first view, advocated by Chierchia (1998) and Krifka (1995), all of the nouns in Chinese are mass nouns. In this view, bare nouns denote a semi-lattice of sets of individuals and sets of pluralities (according to Chierchia), or kinds (according to Krifka), but not individuals. The second view is proposed by Cheng and Sybesma (1998, 1999), who argue that Mandarin Chinese does have a count-mass distinction. The distinction is encoded on classifiers, which perform a task similar to count syntax in English. Count nouns occur with count (individual) classifiers, while mass nouns occur with mass classifiers (measure words). In a recent study, Liu (to appear) argues for a third view: The count mass distinction in Mandarin Chinese does exist, but it cannot be made solely on the basis of the classifier or measure word that accompanies a noun. Rather, we need to resort to quantification in order to decide the status of a noun. Whether a noun takes an individual classifier or a measure word is not a reliable indicator of the countability of nouns because the distinction between the two types of words is not always clear-cut (Tai and Wang 1990). For example, kuai ‘chunk’ occurs with nouns that refer to chunky things such as rocks, e.g. yikuai shitou ‘a rock’, and it also occurs with rou ‘pork’, e.g. yi kuai rou ‘a piece of pork’. If kuai is considered a classifier, it would mean that rou ‘pork’ is a count noun, which does not seem to be supported. On the other hand, if kuai is a classifier in yikuai shitou ‘a rock’, but a measure word in yi kuai rou ‘a piece of pork’, it would mean that kuai is sometimes a classifier and sometimes a measure word. This indeterminacy shows that ability of a noun to take kuai does not necessarily tell us whether it is a count noun or a mass noun. To remedy the situation, Liu (to appear) adopts an idea, suggested in a number of studies (Gordon 1985, Bloom 1999, Barner and Snedeker 2005), that a good tool with which to explore the count-mass issue is quantification. In particular, how quantity is interpreted when nouns are quantified offers clues to their count-mass status. Besides the ability to take classifiers, she proposes two more tests as diagnostics, including the