To express the same meaning, Romance languages (here and elsewhere, I exemplify with Italian), standardly use noun phrases with a definite article: the plural definite with count nouns and the singular definite with mass nouns (sing. il/la/lo/l’, plur. i/gli/le) (2). A singular definite article with count nouns is also possible (3), with the same restrictions as in English (see e.g. Lawler 1973...

By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgment task, Study 1 found that Mandarin speakers ...

Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on counta...

The topics of +MASS and +COUNT have been studied for many decades in philosophy (e.g., (Quine, 1960; Pelletier, 1975)), linguistics (e.g., (McCawley, 1975; Allan, 1980; Krifka, 1991)) and psychology (e.g., (Middleton et al., 2004; Barner et al., 2009). More recently, interest from within computational linguistics has studied the issues involved (e.g., (Pustejovsky, 1991; Bond, 2005; Schmidtke a...

English Theoretical linguists analyse all nouns as either mass or count, but admit that noun meanings can be shifted from one class to the other and classify these shifts. We use distributional semantic models to check how the theoretical analysis of mass-count meaning shifts relates to the actual usage of the nouns. Italiano In linguistica i sostantivi inglesi sono divisi in numerabili e non n...

1. Introduction Children generalize nouns in ways that are consistent with the referent s ontological and/or grammatical kind. In other words, children generalize a new noun based on both the perceptual properties of the referent and the linguistic Cross-linguistic studies have shown that systematic differences in the structures of different languages are reflected in children s novel noun gene...

This paper makes two central claims. The first is that there is an intimate and non-trivial relation between the mass/count distinction on the one hand and the measure/individuation distinction on the other: a (if not the) defining property of mass nouns is that they denote sets of entities which can be measured, while count nouns denote sets of entities which can be counted. Crucially, this is...

Dëne S né (short: Dëne), an Athapaskan language of Northern Canada, does not have any number-related grammatical categories in the nominal domain. Word order is SOV; nominals are optional (Cook 2004, Rice & Saxon 2005). The language lacks articles, case markers, etc., so that when nominal constituents occur, they are often bare nouns. (1) shows bare noun subjects, objects, and postpositional ob...

Mass terms are linguistically defined according to the following features: they do not occur with cardinals (*six rices), they are not pluralisable (*rices), they are quantified over using classifiers (six grains of rice), they accept determiners that do not occur with count nouns and, conversely, do not combine with some count noun articles (much rice/*many rices). The particularities of mass ...

This work explores the linguistic distinction between count and mass nouns in the visual modality. Since the former class typically refers to well-defined, countable objects, with the latter prototypically including less countable substances, we explore to which extent the linguistic distinction is grounded in the visual representations of the entities denoted by count/mass nouns. Using visual ...