none 10.1075/lfab.16.02bal John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 117442589 3579382 1420312 202507022344000022 10.1075 2025-07-02T17:43:23Z 2020-06-29T09:11:10Z 4 Internal and External Variation in Linguistics 1877-6531 10.1075/lfab https://benjamins.com/ catalog/lfab Friederike Moltmann CNRS https://ror.org/02feahw73 The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing). 16 12 17 2020 11 26 2020 9789027208002 9789027260437 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/lfab.16 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027260437 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027260437.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/lfab.16/html Alan Bale Concordia University https://ror.org/0420zvk78 Brendan Gillon McGill University https://ror.org/01pxwe438 Abstract This paper argues that the mass-count distinction does not represent a fundamental division between the world's languages. We demonstrate that such a distinction, as commonly defined within the linguistic literature, often conflates two facts: the semantic fact, found in all languages, that some words have atomic denotations and some do not, and the morphosyntactic fact, found in languages with contrasting singular-plural morphology, that some nouns have both singular and plural forms while others have only one such form. By comparing English with Mandarin Chinese, we discuss whether this morphosyntactic distinction might correlate with the presence or absence of a rich classifier system (as well as other types of quantification). This potential correlation has greatly influenced how linguists have investigated nominal systems across languages and it has even led some to hypothesize that morphosyntactic subcategories might determine the ways in which a grammar can “count” and “quantify.” We outline some important exceptions to this proposed correlation in languages such as Ch’ol, Mi’gmaq and Western Armenian. The paper concludes by arguing not only that there is no such correlation, but that linguists should rethink how they investigate nominal systems, focusing more on lexical variation (even within a single language) than on parametric variations across languages. 12 17 2020 11 26 2020 13 36 10.1075/lfab.16.02bal https://benjamins.com/catalog/lfab.16.02bal https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/lfab.16.02bal/html 10.1093/jos/ffp003 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654277.003.0013 10.1162/LING_a_00170 10.1007/s11525-010-9158-1 Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) Bale 73 2008 Classifiers and number marking 10.1162/LING_a_00147 Language Bloomfield 1933 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199263929.001.0001 Mass terms and model-theoretic semantics Bunt 1985 Grammar of spoken Chinese Chao 1968 The Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies Cheng 28 385 1998 Yi-wan tang, yi-ge tang: classifiers and massifiers 10.1162/002438999554192 10.1162/ling_a_00109 10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_4 10.1007/s11050-017-9132-0 Quantifiers and selection: On the distribution of quantifying expressions in French, Dutch and English Doetjes 1997 Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning Doetjes 2559 2012 Count/mass distinctions across languages 10.3406/flang.1993.1318 10.1007/BF00628112 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00514.x The philosophy of grammar Jespersen 1924 Boolean semantics for natural language Keenan 1985 10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_16 Linguistic Analysis Krifka 25 209 1995 The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.12.001 Language and Linguistics Li 13 693 2012 Measure readings of Mandarin classifier phrases and the particle de 10.1515/9783110852820.302 Parts and wholes in semantics Moltmann 1997 10.1093/oso/9780195095746.001.0001 Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague Montague 1974 English as a formal language Studies in discourse representation theories and the theory of generalized quantifiers Partee 115 1987 Noun phrase interpretation and type shifting principles Word and object Quine 1960 10.1093/jos/ffq007 Where semantics meets pragmatics Rullmann 175 2006 10.1163/9780080462608_012 General number and the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese Proceedings of the 39th North East Linguistic Society (NELS 39) Schwarzschild 661 2011 Subborn distributivity, multiparticipant nouns and the count/mass distinction Parts: A study in ontology Simons 1987 A grammar of Chol, a Mayan language Vázquez Álvarez 2011 Measuring predicates Wellwood 2014 10.1007/s11050-007-9024-9