New insights into English count and mass nouns -the Cognitive Grammar perspective (original) (raw)
Related papers
Count nouns, mass nouns and their transformations: a unified category-theoretic semantics
2004
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 MNs do not. Other syntactic distinctions relate to the determiners and quantifiers. One can say a dog, another dog, many dogs, two dogs, etc.; one cannot correctly say *a matter, *another matter, *many matter, *two matter, etc. It seems that the distinction in English grammar was introduced by Otto Jespersen [6, p198].
Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw, 2019
One of the dimensions of the process of semantic extension of the noun is the change of the grammatical properties from count to mass and mass to count that can be observed between the primary and extended sense. Although in English such changes are nothing unusual-numerous nouns are both count and mass nouns (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985, 247-248; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 334-335), the phenomenon is still far from being explored and explained in detail. The paper focuses on two of its dimensions: the formation of such senses and the regularities found among the extended senses of nouns designating body parts. As it turns out, although these nouns are classified in dictionaries as either solely or predominantly count nouns, they possess a whole network of mass senses that designate untypical dimensions of the body. The analysis allows us to specify which dimensions these are, and which of these dimensions are shared by nouns referring to different parts of the body. The linguistic data, 180 utterances produced by native speakers of English, come from the Internet. The analysis is based on the assumptions of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2000a, 2000b, 2008, etc.) and such notions as conventionalization, extension, schematization, and encyclopaedic knowledge.
In Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (ed.) Languages with and without articles. in press.
Recent literature has mostly emphasized the non-reducibility of the linguistic mass-count distinction to the cognitive atomicity-homogeneity distinction (Chierchia 1998, Rothstein 2010, among others). The present paper argues on the basis of the distribution of bare nouns in two unrelated languages, Karitiana, a native Brazilian language, and (Modern) Hebrew, that the mass-count distinction reflects the cognitive distinction of the individuability of units. Nevertheless, we do not revert to the naïve view that takes this linguistic distinction to reflect a cognitive distinction between homogeneous matter which lacks units for counting and discrete entities which have atomic units and thus can be counted.We argue instead that the linguistic mass-count distintion corresponds to the cognitive distinction between stable or non-stable units with respect to a context. On the basis of Karitiana, we argue first for the general point that countability is independent of a formal linguistic mass-count distinction. Next, on the basis of Hebrew, we substantiate the claim that the linguistic mass-count distinction is based on the contrast between stable and non-stable units relative to a context.
This paper reviews the literature on the mass/count distinction, focusing on the relationship between individuability and countability, and the role of language variation in understanding the mass/count contrast.
Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with 'Dual-Life' Nouns
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017), 2017
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 and Kuperman, 2016)), to name just a few. As is pointed out in these works, there are many difficult conceptual issues involved in the study of this contrast. In this article we study one of these issues – the “Dual-Life” of being simultaneously +MASS and +COUNT – by means of an unusual combination of human annotation, online lexical resources, and online corpora.