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9 - The Count/Mass Distinction for Granular Nouns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2021

By
Peter R. Sutton  and
Hana Filip
Edited by
Hana Filip
Hana Filip
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

Granular mass nouns, such as rice, have conceptually, and perceptually, salient entities in their denotations (i.e., individual rice grains). However, these entities are not directly accessible to semantic counting operations, nor can granular mass nouns be coerced into a count interpretation involving such entities. In this paper, Sutton and Filip address why this should be the case. Their analysis is based on the proposal that there are two key ingredients in lexical entries for grammatical counting: the object identifying function, which identifies perceptually or functionally salient entities in a noun’s denotation, and the schema of individuation, which concerns a perspective on these entities relative to a context of utterance. Based on these parameters, as well as on the mereotopological differences between concepts denoting granulars (rice, lentil), as opposed to other Spelke objects (cat, chair), Sutton and Filip show how we can explain why granular nouns exhibit count/mass variation within and between languages. Finally, they outline why the grammatical reflexes of granular nouns is central to understanding countability from a cross-linguistic perspective.

Keywords

granular mass nounsobject identifying functionschema of individuationmereotopologySpelke object
Type
Chapter
Information
Countability in Natural Language , pp. 252 - 291
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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