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6 - Iceberg Semantics for Count Nouns and Mass Nouns: How Mass Counts
- By Fred Landman
Edited by Hana Filip, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Book:

Countability in Natural Language

Published online:

11 June 2021

Print publication:

01 July 2021, pp 161-198
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Summary

This chapter analyses the relation between mass noun phrases and measure readings within Landman’s theory of Iceberg semantics. Landman not only applies Iceberg semantics to different noun classes, but also generalizes the theory to apply to DPs and different interpretations of measure phrases. These developments are then used to address the main puzzle in the paper: ‘when mass counts’. Based on data mostly from Dutch and German, Landman proposes an explanation for why not only neat mass nouns, such as furniture, admit of cardinality comparison readings with quantifiers, such as most, and are felicitous with stubbornly distributive adjectives, such as big, but why it is also the case that mess mass nouns, such as meat, can also get cardinality comparison readings in the same contexts. For the latter case, the key to the analysis is to make use of contextual portioning, a process that is independently motivated in the portion readings of measure phrases.