A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian para...

Outline Although the grammatical mass/count distinction ultimately depends on lexical selection and is subject to cross-linguistic variation, the perceptual mass/count distinction is determined by the intuitive availability of atomic objects. An illuminating definition of atomic object is proposed under the framework built by Chierchia (2010). This analysis facilitates a sensible solution to th...

Recent research has documented that for infants as young as 12–13 months of age, novel words (both count nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities among objects and, in this way, foster the formation of object categories. The current experiment was designed to capture more precisely the scope of this phenomenon. We asked whether novel words (count nouns; adjectives) are linked specifically ...

In classifier languages, nouns must appear with one of a series of classifiers in order to be modified by a numeral. This squib presents new data from Mi’gmaq (Algonquian) and Chol (Mayan), arguing that classifiers are required due to the syntactic and semantic properties of the numeral (as in Krifka 1995), rather than the noun (as in Chierchia 1998). The results are shown to have important con...

This research concerns how children learn the distinction between substance names and object names. Quine (1969) proposed that children learn the distinction through learning the syntactic distinctions inherent in count/mass grammar. However, Soja et al. (1991) found that English-speaking 2-year-olds, who did not seem to have acquired count/mass grammar, distinguished objects from substances in...

The present paper describes the construction of a resource to determine the lexical preference class of a large number of English nouns (≈ 14,000) with respect to the distinction between mass and count interpretations. In constructing the lexicon, we have employed a questionnaire-based approach based on existing resources such as the Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) and WordNet (Miller, 1995). The...

Atomic mass nouns share morphosyntactic properties with prototypical mass nouns. At the same time, the former semantically deviate from the latter. Based on re-examined empirical data, I propose that the semantics of atomic mass nouns is flexible. Particularly, a semantic shift occurs when the default interpretation of an atomic mass noun results in implausible interpretation or ungrammaticality.

In this paper I examine two types of nominalizations related to color adjectives in Greek, a suffixed one and a neutral one, which I will compare to their English and Dutch (and German) counterparts. I show that the two differ in that suffixed nominalizations denote stage level properties, while neuter nominalizations denote individual level properties. This difference is due to the fact that s...

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions–in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a languagewhere all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural distincti...