Words from different grammatical categories (e.g., nouns and adjectives) highlight different aspects of the same objects (e.g., object categories and object properties). Two experiments examine the acquisition of this phenomenon in 14-month-olds, asking whether infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g., four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g., animals) o...

Chierchia 1998 proposes that languages vary in terms of what they allow their NPs to denote. This variation is encoded in a semantic parameter which determines whether NPs denote names of kinds (and are therefore argumental) [+arg, -pred], predicates (and therefore require a determiner to be in an argument position) [-arg, +pred] or either [+arg, +pred]. In this paper we argue using data from b...

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...

There is an ongoing debate regarding the syntactic and semantic nature of the mass versus count-noun distinction. If we concentrate solely on the semantic side of the debate, we can distinguish two families of approaches. The first approach, represented, for instance, by Link (1983) and Chierchia (1998), among others, argues that the difference between mass and count can be reduced to homogenei...

Sortal concepts, lexicalized as count nouns in languages with a count/mass distinction, pro , criteria for individuation and numerical identity . This paper examines Quine's and Piaget's cla that babies and young children lack the logical resources to represent sortal concepts . Evidence is marshalled against the Quine/Piaget position, in favor of a view that even yo infants represent at least ...

We develop a data set of Malay lexemes labelled with count classifiers, that are attested in raw or lemmatised corpora. A maximum entropy classifier based on simple, languageinspecific features generated from context tokens achieves about 50% F-score, or about 65% precision when a suite of binary classifiers is built to aid multi-class prediction of headword nouns. Surprisingly, numeric feature...

Abstract We examine three constructions across several languages in which a mass noun is embedded what appears to be count environment, but the construction as whole remains mass. argue that discussed phenomena—“Q-noun” like lots of water , bare measure kilos sugar and pluralised nouns Greek Persian—all involve portioning-out denotation. provide structural account portioning out propose structu...

Abstract The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics science. This commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization that are attributed words , not directly. In paper we explore relationship linguistic properties En...