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Mass/Count Variation: A Mereological, Two-Dimensional Semantics, Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

We argue that two types of context are central to grounding the semantics for the mass/count distinction. We combine and develop the accounts of Rothstein (2010) and Landman (2011), which emphasize (non-)overlap at a context. We also adopt some parts of Chierchia’s (2010) account which uses precisifying contexts. We unite these strands in a two-dimensional semantics that covers a wide range of the puzzling variation data in mass/count lexicalization. Most importantly, it predicts where we should expect to find such variation for some classes of nouns but not for others, and also explains why.