According to Chad Hansen’s “mass noun hypothesis,” the semantics of Classical Chinese nouns is similar to that of English mass nouns, and this helps to explain why ancient Chinese theories of language are nominalist. Mass nouns, Hansen suggests, are most naturally interpreted as denoting mereological wholes, a construal that intuitively tends to motivate a nominalist theory of language. The pap...

Previous research has revealed that English-speaking preschoolers expect that a novel count noun (but not a novel adjective), applied to an individual object, may be extended to other members of the same basic or superordinate level category. However, because the existing literature is based almost exclusively on English-speakers, it is unclear whether this specific expectation is evident in ch...

This study intends to investigate the realizations and functional patterns of shell nouns in Applied Linguistics research articles.  To this end, fifty research articles in the field of Applied Linguistic were selected from Journal of English for Academic Purposes and journal of English for Specific Purposes published by Elsevier.  The articles were analyzed for the realizatio...

Decades of research have documented that young word learners have more difficulty learning verbs than nouns. Nonetheless, recent evidence has uncovered conditions under which children as young as 24 months succeed. Here, we focus in on the kind of linguistic information that undergirds 24-month-olds’ success. We introduced 24month-olds to novel words (either nouns or verbs) as they watched dyna...

The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in...

What does mass–count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., cats) while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., water). We evaluated this claim using the quantity judgment method, and tested the...