Introduction

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. 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)

Iceberg Semantics For Count Nouns And Mass Nouns: Classifiers, measures and portions

The background for this paper is the framework of Boolean semantics for mass and count nouns, and singular and plural count nouns, as developed from the work of Godehard Link in Link 1983 (see e.g. the expositions in Landman 1991, 2010). Link-style Boolean semantics for nouns (here called Mountain semantics) analyzes the oppositions mass-count and singular-plural in terms of the notion of atomicity: counting is in terms of singular objects, which are taken to be atoms. Consequently, Link bases his semantics on two separate Boolean domains: a non-atomic mass domain and an atomic count domain. Singular count nouns are interpreted as sets of atoms, and semantic plurality is closure under sum, so plural objects are sums of atoms. In this, sorted setup portions - like two portions of soup - are a puzzle: they are mass stuff - soup -, but count - two. But in order to be count they must be atoms. But they are not, because they are just soup. Mountain semantics can deal with portions, but at a cost. In the first part of this paper I outline Iceberg semantics, an alternative to Mountain semantics within the general framework of Boolean semantics. Iceberg semantics specifies a compositional mechanism which associates with the standard denotation of any noun phrase (here called the body) a base set, a set that generates the body under the sum operation ⊔. For count nouns, the base is the set in terms of which the members of the body are counted and to which distribution takes place. In Iceberg semantics, what allows counting to be correct is the requirement on the interpretations of count nouns that the base of their interpretation is (contextually) disjoint. Already at this level we see two salient properties of Iceberg semantics: -Atoms and atomicity play no role in the theory, so we can assume an unsorted interpretation domain for mass nouns and count nouns. In Iceberg semantics, mass and count can be seen as different perspectives on the same stuff (different bases for the same body). This means that we can do away with the extreme body-sorting and body-gridding that atomicity entails. With this we allow a simpler and more elegant analysis of mass-count interactions. For instance, portions can just be \u27mass\u27 stuff, evaluated relative to a count base. -The mass-count distinction is formulated in terms of disjointness of the base. Iceberg semantics associates bases not just with the interpretations of lexical nouns, but with NPs in general and with DPs. This means that Iceberg semantics provides a compositional semantic theory of the mass-count distinction, and hence it provides a framework in which the mass-count nature of complex NPs and of DPs can be fruitfully studied. It is the analysis of complex NPs and their mass-count properties that is the focus of the second part of this paper. There I develop an analysis of English and Dutch pseudo- partitives, in particular, measure phrases like three liters of wine and classifier phrases like three glasses of wine. We will study measure interpretations and classifier interpretations of measures and classifiers, and different types of classifier interpretations: container interpretations, contents interpretations, and - indeed - portion interpretations. Rothstein 2011 argues that classifier interpretations (including portion interpretations) of pseudo partitives pattern with count nouns, but that measure interpretations pattern with mass nouns. I will show that this distinction follows from the very basic architecture of Iceberg semantics

Semantic categories underlying the meaning of ‘place’

This paper analyses the semantics of natural language expressions that are associated with the intuitive notion of ‘place’. We note that the nature of such terms is highly contested, and suggest that this arises from two main considerations: 1) there are a number of logically distinct categories of place expression, which are not always clearly distinguished in discourse about ‘place’; 2) the many non-substantive place count nouns (such as ‘place’, ‘region’, ‘area’, etc.) employed in natural language are highly ambiguous. With respect to consideration 1), we propose that place-related expressions should be classified into the following distinct logical types: a) ‘place-like’ count nouns (further subdivided into abstract, spatial and substantive varieties), b) proper names of ‘place-like’ objects, c) locative property phrases, and d) definite descriptions of ‘place-like’ objects. We outline possible formal representations for each of these. To address consideration 2), we examine meanings, connotations and ambiguities of the English vocabulary of abstract and generic place count nouns, and identify underlying elements of meaning, which explain both similarities and differences in the sense and usage of the various terms

Counting, Measuring And The Semantics Of Classifiers

This paper makes two central claims. The first is that there is an intimate and non-trivial relation between the mass/count distinction on the one hand and the measure/individuation distinction on the other: a (if not the) defining property of mass nouns is that they denote sets of entities which can be measured, while count nouns denote sets of entities which can be counted. Crucially, this is a difference in grammatical perspective and not in ontological status. The second claim is that the mass/count distinction between two types of nominals has its direct correlate at the level of classifier phrases: classifier phrases like two bottles of wine are ambiguous between a counting, or individuating, reading and a measure reading. On the counting reading, this phrase has count semantics, on the measure reading it has mass semantics

Brazilian Bare Phrases and Referentiality: Evidences from an Experiment

This paper experimentally investigates the denotation of the bare singulars (BS) and bare plural noun phrases (BP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP). The first section reviews two theories concerning the semantics of the bare nouns in BrP: the count theory according to which bare nouns are countable (plural sums); and the mass theory, which proposes that there is a difference between these bare nouns, since only the BP is a count noun. The second section presents the experiment. It explores the relation between the semantics of BSs and BPs in a mass context. 64 participants were asked to perform quantity judgments (on number, volume, both number and volume or none) in a comprehension task. The task relied on visual and hearing information. The results show that BSs allow preferentially comparison by volume scales, though they accept the count reading. The presence of the plural morpheme ([-s]) only allows quantity judgments based on number. Thus, the experiment failed to support the count hypothesis that BSs are number neutral (SCHMITT; MUNN, 1999; MUNN; SCHMITT, 2005; MÜLLER, 2002), and corroborates Pires de Oliveira & Rothstein's (2011) mass hypothesis. Relying on Rothstein & Pires de Oliveira (in press), we propose that the morpho-syntactic plural mark imposes counting and that the cardinal reading of the BS is derived from measuring.

Can mass-count syntax be derived from semantics?

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)

Variables, Generality and Existence: considerations on the notion of a concept-script

A defense of the Frege / Russell idea of logic as a 'concept=script' or 'ideal language', and a discussion of the relationship of this project to the formalisation of mass nouns or non-count noun

Lexicalization of Light Verb Structures and the Semantics of Nouns

In this study I shall focus on two Romance idiomatic patterns and the semantics of nouns. It is shown that idioms, in addition to having distinct basic argument structure representations, are formed in syntax by various instantiations of Merge. It is argued that there is a lexicalization pattern reflecting semantic conflation (Talmy 1985, 2000) between cause and degree. This pattern, in syntactic terms, is the output of subsequent Merge operations (Chomsky 1995) between the object noun of a monadic argument structure, an indefinite quantifier and an adjunct phrase. The study of this lexicalization pattern is of interest with regard to the semantics of bare nouns, especially of bare count singular nouns in object position; it is proved that bare nouns are interpreted as properties, and, because of this, they permit quantification over degrees. By contrast, there is a second lexicalization pattern starting from a composite argument structure which licenses an individual or a kind denoting reading for the DP object

Natural Language Ontology

The aim of natural language ontology is to uncover the ontological categories and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, that a speaker accepts when using a language. This article aims to clarify what exactly the subject matter of natural language ontology is, what sorts of linguistic data it should take into account, how natural language ontology relates to other branches of metaphysics, in what ways natural language ontology is important, and what may be distinctive of the ontological categories and structures reflected in natural language

Beers, kaffi, and Schnaps : different grammatical options for 'restaurant talk' coercions in three Germanic languages

This paper discusses constructions like “We’ll have two beers and a coffee.” that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behaviour of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morpho-syntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved here. We show that even within such a closely related linguistic sample, one finds three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual transition. Our findings suggest an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic phenomenon, a phenomenon that is located on a level of semantic representations that serves as an interface between the conceptual and the grammatical system and takes into account inter- and intralinguistic variations