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Object mass nouns, such as furniture, are mass, but they allow quantity evaluations and comparisons in terms of a cardinal scale. This paper addresses the vexing question of how such cardinal comparisons are possible for object mass nouns, given that, as mass nouns, these expressions are not countable. Building upon her theory of count nouns based on semantic atomicity (entities that are indexed to counting contexts), and on her work on the distinction between counting and measuring and the semantics of measure functions, Rothstein proposes a treatment of quantity evaluations for object mass nouns based on measure comparisons using values on a cardinality scale which, unlike counting does not require access to a set of semantic atoms. Rothstein then extends this analysis and argues that two types of estimation operations have grammatical properties associated with measuring: Russian approximative inversion, and cardinality estimation in Mandarin.
This book focuses on current theoretical and empirical research into countability in the nominal domain, and to a lesser extent in the verbal domain. The presented state-of-the-art studies are situated within compositional semantics combined with the theory of mereology, and draw on a wealth of data, some of which have hitherto been unknown, from a number of typologically distinct languages. Some contributions propose enrichments of classical extensional mereology with topological and temporal notions as well as with type theory and probabilistic models. The book also presents analyses that rely on cutting-edge empirical research (experimental, corpus-based) into meaning in language. It is suitable as a point of departure for original research or material for seminars in semantics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and other fields of cognitive science. It is of interest not only to a semanticist, but also to anybody who wishes to gain insights into the contemporary research into countability.
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