Chierchia (1998) proposed that the semantic type of nouns varies across languages: in some languages, nouns denote entities; in others, nouns denote predicates; in yet others, nouns of both types are attested. Chierchia posits the existence of two parameters to account for this division— namely [±arg], which determines whether a language contains nouns denoting arguments, and [±pred], which det...

0. Introduction The issue of what is usually, but also misleadingly (see below) called the count-mass distinction, i.e. the grammatical distinction between nouns that can be counted (e.g. a car, two cars, many cars) and nouns that cannot (e.g. *a sand, *two sands, *many sands, sand, much sand), has been addressed and accounted for in different ways. This paper aims at giving a critical survey o...

All natural languages seem to distinguish at the semantic level between count nouns (CNs) and mass nouns (MNs). Some natural languages, like English, mark the distinction at the syntactic level. Prototypical of CNs is ‘dog’ and of MNs is ‘matter’ (in the sense of physical stuff, not in the sense of concern or affair). One syntactic difference is that usually CNs take the plural (‘dogs’) whereas...

We describe MH who presents with agrammatic aphasia and anomia, and who produces semantic errors in the absence of a central semantic impairment. This pattern of performance implies damage to syntactic processes operating between semantics and phonological output. Damage here may lead to lexical selection errors and a deficit in combining words to form phrases. We investigated MH's knowledge an...

Complex phrases are also brought into the categorization, so that cutlery that is in the drawer and hot water are mass phrases while tree that is in the park and tall person are count phrases. I use ‘mass term’ and ‘count term’ to cover both nouns and more complex noun phrases. (As well, some theorists admit other grammatical categories into the count/mass realm: some verb phrases and some adje...

This paper examines children's early noun vocabularies and their interpretations of names for solid and non-solid things. Previous research in this area assumes that ontology, category organization and syntax correspond in the nouns children learn early such that categories of solid things are organized by shape similarity and named with count nouns and categories of non-solid things are organi...

Previous research has found that agrammatic Broca aphasic patients have particular difficulty using determiners like "a" and "the" for the purposes of sentence comprehension. In this study, we test whether or not such difficulty extends to the level where lexical subcategories are distinguished by these articles. The absence or presence of a determiner distinguishes proper from common nouns (e....