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9 - Counting (on) Bare Nouns: Revelations from American Sign Language

from Implications from Individual Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

By
Helen Koulidobrova
Edited by
Tibor Kiss ,
Francis Jeffry Pelletier  and
Halima Husić
Tibor Kiss
Affiliation:
Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany
Francis Jeffry Pelletier
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Halima Husić
Affiliation:
Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany
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Summary

This paper deals with ASL nouns and demonstrates (despite previous suggestions in the literature) that ASL belongs to Chierchia’s group (III), i.e. languages without overt number marking and a visible countability distinction. Although the countability distinction appears to be hidden at first glance, it can be flushed out. I account for the phenomenon in terms of properties of [n+__ ], showing that the countability distinction must be grammatical in ASL. This paper is thus a first step towards an examination of the count/mass distinction in ASL. We find that as predicted by the previous literature (Chierchia 2010, Deal 2017), the countability distinction in ASL, albeit not being immediately visible at all, is connected to number marking.

Keywords

American Sign LanguageCountability hierarchy of languagesQuantificational value of ASL nounsNumber-neutral languages
Type
Chapter
Information
Things and Stuff
The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction
 , pp. 213 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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