Abstract
The main thesis I would like to develop and defend in this paper is that mass nouns come out of the lexicon with plurality already built in and that that is the (only) way in which they differ from count nouns. On the basis of this hypothesis (let us dub it the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis), I will offer a new account of the distribution of mass and count quantifiers, one that takes into consideration possible crosslinguistic variations in such distribution. I will also address, in a preliminary and somewhat speculative way, the issue of languages (such as Chinese) that are said not to have count nouns. One conclusion that we will reach is that there is some limited variation in the way in which the syntactic structure of NPs is mapped onto its denotation across different languages. If crosslinguistic variation is to be accounted for in terms of parametric differences, then the mass/count distinction seems to provide evidence for a semantic parameter. In the rest of this introduction, I will first try to give in a highly informal way an idea of the main thesis to be defended. Then I will briefly review the main data to be accounted for. Looking ahead to the overall organization of the paper, in section 2 I give some background assumptions on the nature of plurality. In section 3 I will present in detail the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis and show how it accounts for the data presented below. In section 4, I will consider further empirical consequences of the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis and see how it compares to a sample of other current influential approaches. Finally, in section 5, I will tackle the issue of languages allegedly without count nouns.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barker, C. (1992) “Group Terms in English: Representing Groups as Atoms”, Journal of Semantics, 9: 69–93.
Barwise, J. and R. Cooper (1981) “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 4: 159–219.
Bennett, M. (1974) Some Extensions of a Montague Fragment of English, Ph. D. Dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Bunt, H. (1985) Mass terms and Model theoretic Semantics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Carlson, G. (1977) Reference to Kinds in English, Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; published in 1980 by Garland, New York.
Chierchia, G. (1983) Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Infinitives and Gerunds, Ph. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Published in 1989 by Garland, New York.
Chierchia, G. and R. Turner (1985) “Semantics and Property Theory”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 11:261–302.
Chierchia, G. (1996) “Reference to Kinds across Languages”, ms. University of Milan.
Contreras, H. (1986) “Spanish Bare NP’s and the ECP”, in I. Bordelois, H. Contreras and K. Zagona (eds) Generative Studies in Spanish Syntax, Foris, Dordrecht.
DeVilliers, J. and P. de Villiers (1973) “A Cross-sectional Study of the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Child Speech”, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2: 267–278.
Delfitto, D. and J. Schroten (1992) “Bare Plurals and the Number Affix in DP”, OTS Working Papers, Utrecht.
Hoeksema, J. (1983) “Plurality and Conjunction”, in A. ter Meulen (ed.) Studies in Modeltheoretic Semantics, GRASS 1, Foris, Dordrecht.
Fiengo, R. and H. Lasnik (1973) “The Logical Structure of Reciprocal Sentences in English”, Foundations of Language, 9: 447–468.
Fox, C. (1993) Mass terms and plurals in property theory, Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Essex, Colchester.
Gallin, D. (1975) Intensional and Higher Order Logic, North Holland, Amsterdam.
Gillon, B. (1987) “The Readings of Plural Noun Phrases in English”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 13:477–485.
Gillon, B. (1992) “Towards a Common Semantics for English Count and Mass Nouns”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 15: 597–640.
Gordon, P. (1982) The Acquisition of Syntactic Categories: the Case of the Mass/Count Distinction, Ph. D. Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge.
Higginbotham, J. (1994) “Mass and Count Quantifiers”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 17: 447–480.
Krifka, M. (1995) “Common Nouns: A Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English” in G. Carlson and J. Pelletier (eds) The Generic Book, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Landman, F. (1989a) “Groups, I”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12: 559–605.
Landman, F. (1989b) “Groups II”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12: 723–744.
Landman, F. (1995) “Plurality”, in S. Lappin (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Blackwell, Oxford.
Landman, F. (1996) Events and Plurality: the Jerusalem Lectures, to appear, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Link, G. (1983) “The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A Lattice Theoretic Approach”, R. Bauerle, C. Schwartze and A. von Stechow (eds.) Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language, de Gruyter, Berlin.
Lonning, J.-T. (1987) “Mass terms and Quantification”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 10:1–52.
Markman, E. (1989) Categorizing and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Montague, R. (1973) “Comments on Moravcsik’s Paper” in J. Hintikka, J. Moravcsik and P. Suppes (eds) Approaches to Natural Languages, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Partee, B. H. (1988) “Many Quantifiers” in Proceeding of ESCOL.
Pelletier, J. and L. Schubert (1989) “Mass Expressions”, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.) The Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. 4, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, Morrow, New York.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Scha, R. (1984) “Distributive, Collective and Cumulative Quantification” in J. Groenendijk et al (eds) Truth, Interpretation and Information, GRASS 2, Foris, Dordrecth.
Schwarzchild, R. (1991) On the Meaning of Definite Plural NPs, Ph. D. Dissertation, Amherst.
Schwarzchild, R. (1996) Pluralities, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Selkirk, E. (1977) “Some Remarks on Noun Phrase Structure” in P. Culicover, T. Wasow and A. Akmajan (eds) Formal Syntax, Academic Press, New York.
Sharvy, R. (1980) “A More General Theory of Definite Descriptions”, The Philosophical Review, 89:607–624.
Soja, N. S. Carey and E. Spelke (1991) “Ontological categories Guide Young Children’s Induction of Word Meaning: Object terms and Substance Terms”, Cognition, 38: 179–211.
Spelke, E. (1985) “Perception of Unity, Persistence and Identity: Thoughts on Infants’ Conception of Objects” in J. Mehler and R. Fox (eds) Neonate Cognition: Beyond the Blooming and Buzzing Confusion, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale NJ.
Torrego, E. (1989) “Unergative-Unaccusative Alternations in Spanish”, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge.
Wexler, K. and Manzini M. R. (1987) “Parameters and Learnability” in T. Roeper and E. Williams (eds) Parameters Setting, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chierchia, G. (1998). Plurality of Mass Nouns and the Notion of “Semantic Parameter”. In: Rothstein, S. (eds) Events and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0289-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3969-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive