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14 - The Role of Context and Cognition in Countability: A Psycholinguistic Account of Lexical Distributions

from New Empirical Approaches to the Semantics of the Count–Mass Distinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

By
Francesca Franzon ,
Giorgio Arcara  and
Chiara Zanini
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

Linguistic theory has provided different formalizations regarding the issue of countability, but it has hardly ever measured the occurrence of nouns as mass and as count in language use. This work illustrates a rating study on subjective frequency of Italian nouns inflected in the singular and in the plural. The rating scores were compared to the corpus frequency of nouns in mass and count contexts. The results suggest that in Italian almost every noun can occur as countable. Moreover, negative correlations were never found between the count use and the mass use of nouns. These results are discussed with respect to the different theoretical accounts.

Keywords

Subjective frequency of mass vs. countCorpus frequency of mass vs. countCritique of current experimental literatureContext-driven countabilityUnderspecification
Type
Chapter
Information
Things and Stuff
The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction
 , pp. 321 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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