Various theories propose that count nouns are distinguished from mass nouns by their specification of individuation. We present evidence that, while 3-year-old children acquiring language extend words differentially on the basis of masscount syntax, they quantify over individuals for both novel mass and count nouns. We suggest that children may begin acquisition with an underspecified represent...

Articles in general and definite articles in particular can create problems even long after all other aspects of English have been mastered. The present article investigated the learnability problems related to the acquisition of count-mass distinction of English nominals by Persian L2 learners. The theoretical underpinning of the study is the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopou...

The semantics of the mass/count distinction has long been a central issue in formal linguistics (Quine, 1960; Link, 1983), with much debate over the nature of these two classes of nouns (Doetjes, 1996; Chierchia, 2010; Rothstein, 2010; Pelletier, 2010). In the vast literature on the mass/count distinction the following criteria, listed by Chierchia (1998), have played a key role in distinguishi...

Analysing aspects of how our brain processes language may provide, even before the language faculty is really understood, useful insights into higher order cognitive functions. We take a small exploratory step in this direction with an attempt to test the ability of a standard, biologically plausible self-organising neural network to learn the association between syntax and semantics around the...

Making use of Kayne’s (2005, 2010) theory light nouns, this article argues that nouns are part (simple) names and a mass/count distinction among explains the behavior certain types in German as mass rather than count. The elaborates role with new generalizations regarding their linguistic quantificational pronominal NPs, selection relative pronouns German, general difference support plural anap...

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the processing of mass nouns used as count nouns and count nouns used as mass nouns. Following Copestake and Briscoe (1995), the basic or underived sense of a word was treated as the input to a derivational rule (“grinding” or “portioning”) which produced the derived sense as output. It was hypothesized that in the absence of biasing evidence readers wo...

The systematic connection between English mass and count nouns has long been known. Those working within lexical semantics have frequently cited such systematic connections as instances which are susceptible of treatment by so-called lexical rules (Leech 1981), lexical inference rules (Ostler and Atkins 1991), or subtype coercion (Pustejovsky 1995). This paper has three aims: to present the pri...

This chapter investigates the rationale for having the lexical categories or features mass and count. Some theories make the features be syntactic; others make them be semantic. It is concluded here that none of the standard accounts of their function actually serve the purpose for which they are adopted, and that we should instead remove these features from the lexicon and have lexical nouns b...