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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mass/Count Variation: A Mereological, Two-Dimensional Semantics, Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip
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.
Counting And Measuring: A Theoretical And Crosslinguistic Account, Susan Rothstein
Counting And Measuring: A Theoretical And Crosslinguistic Account, Susan Rothstein
Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
In this paper, I show that expressions like two glasses of wine are ambiguous between counting and measuring interpretations, and that each interpretation is associated with a different semantic representation. In each interpretation, glasses has a different function. In the counting interpretation, glasses is a relational noun, while in the measure interpretation, glasses is a measure head analogous to litre. This difference leads to a number of grammatical contrasts which can be explained by differences in the grammatical structure. I discuss whether these differences are only semantic or also expressed in the syntactic representation. The assumption that syntax directly reflects …