Hana Filip - Böcker

This book proposes an object-centred and contextualist account of the count/mass distinction. The main empirical finding is that there is a connection between variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns across and within languages and the ways in which mass or count nouns can diverge from manifesting the canonical grammatical reflexes expected of the count/mass distinction in a given language. Assuming compositional semantics enriched with Classical Extensional Mereology, Peter Sutton and Hana Filip propose that mass-count pairs of nouns (across and within languages) lexicalize the same number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects, which comprises not only one discrete entity separate from other entities, but also a discrete entity based on its affordances and topological properties. For a concrete common noun to be grammatically count, as needed in counting and quantificational constructions, it must specify a quantized set of objects relative to a context of individuation. Context plays a crucial role, since it can afford different ways of viewing the entities in a noun's extension, and so what counts as 'one' for that noun in that context. The book outlines a system of three perceptual-interactive constraints, based upon how we perceive and interact with objects, that predicts the propensity for a number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects to nonetheless be lexicalized as mass. These constraints are also key to explaining variation in the count/mass lexicalization patterns of such properties. The authors also show that the extent to which a core property can satisfy these constraints can be estimated from a corpus, and how these corpus measures can be used to model variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns. The main data relies on concrete common nouns in number-marking languages, namely Czech, English, Finnish, and German, but the account is also extended to abstract nouns, and to two non-number-marking languages, namely Mandarin and Yudja.

First published in 1999. This book examines the interplay between the semantics of noun phrases and verbal predicates, with an emphasis on data drawn from Czech and English, and comparisons to German and Finnish. This book will be of interest to a wide range of linguists concerned with aspect and how it interacts with lexical semantics, morphology, syntax and quantification.

This book focuses on current theoretical and empirical research into countability in the nominal domain, and to a lesser extent in the verbal domain. The presented state-of-the-art studies are situated within compositional semantics combined with the theory of mereology, and draw on a wealth of data, some of which have hitherto been unknown, from a number of typologically distinct languages. Some contributions propose enrichments of classical extensional mereology with topological and temporal notions as well as with type theory and probabilistic models. The book also presents analyses that rely on cutting-edge empirical research (experimental, corpus-based) into meaning in language. It is suitable as a point of departure for original research or material for seminars in semantics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and other fields of cognitive science. It is of interest not only to a semanticist, but also to anybody who wishes to gain insights into the contemporary research into countability.