Count Nouns - Mass Nouns, Neat Nouns - Mess Nouns

• Main Author: Fred Landman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Prairie Press 2010-12-01
• Series: The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1579

<p>In this paper I propose and formalize a theory of the mass-count distinction in which the denotations of count nouns are built from non-overlapping generators, while the denotations of mass nouns are built from overlapping generators. Counting is counting of generators, and it will follow that counting is only correct on count denotations. <br /><br /> I will show that the theory allows two kinds of mass nouns: <em>mess</em> mass nouns with denotations built from overlapping minimal generators, and <em>neat </em>mass nouns with denotations built from overlapping generators, where the overlap is not located in the minimal generators. Prototypical mass nouns like <em>meat </em>and <em>mud </em>are of the first kind. I will argue that mass nouns like <em>furniture</em> and <em>kitchenware </em>are of the second type.<br /> <br /> I will discuss several phenomena—all involving one way or the other explicitly or implicitly individual classifiers like <em>stuks </em>in Dutch—that show that both distinctions mass/count and mess/neat are linguistically robust. I will show in particular that nouns like <em>kitchenware </em>pattern in various ways like count nouns, and not like mess mass nouns, and that these ways naturally involve the neat structure of their denotation. I will also show that they are real mass nouns: they can involve measures in the way mess mass nouns can and count nouns cannot.<br /> <br /> I will discuss grinding interpretations of count nouns, here rebaptized <em>fission </em>interpretations, and argue that these interpretations differ in crucial ways from the interpretations of lexical mass nouns. 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