Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T14:37:14.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Count–Mass Asymmetries: The Importance of Being Count

from Large-Scale Architectures for Count and Mass

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

By
Jenny Doetjes
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
Get access

Summary

The term count/mass distinction, despite its success as a name for a domain of research, suggests a symmetry between count and mass that is not supported by cross-linguistic data. A first asymmetry is related to the grammatical encoding of count vs. mass. A second asymmetry between count and mass is related to the sensitivity of quantity expressions to count and mass meaning and count morphology. A third asymmetry concerns possible meanings of nouns. Whereas there is strong evidence that an opposition between count and mass meanings plays an important role in the lexicon even of languages that seem at first mass-only, there do seem to exist count-only languages. The second part of the paper will consider count meanings across languages. What types of meanings are count? What are reliable diagnostics for count meaning? Are there differences in this respect between obligatory number marking languages (also commonly called ‘mass/count languages’) and languages that do not have obligatory number?

Keywords

Differences between count and massCross-language comparisonsCognitive salience of count nounsNatural atomicity
Type
Chapter
Information
Things and Stuff
The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction
 , pp. 81 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×