Countability distinctions and semantic variation

Deal, Amy Rose

doi:10.1007/s11050-017-9132-0

Cited by 39 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…A sentence where a pluralised mass noun, like waters in (1a), occurs, can only be rescued when the mass term is coerced or reinterpreted as types of or standardized quantities of the relevant substance, such as in (2) or (3) (Allan 1980;Link 1983;Chierchia 1998;2010;Deal 2017, among many others). 1 (2) In this restaurant we offer three waters: sparkling, still, and tap water.…”

Section: Plural Marking On Mass Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Renans

Romoli

Makri

et al. 2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward-versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

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Section: Plural Marking On Mass Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Renans

Romoli

Makri

et al. 2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Deal (2017) also reaches the same conclusion on the basis of an illuminating analysis of Nez Perce, where the mass/count distinction shows up unambiguously only in relation to the number morphology of the attributive adjective in the structure that features a quantifier.…”

mentioning

confidence: 55%

The mass/count distinction in Japanese from the perspective of partitivity

Watanabe

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This article presents a novel set of observations concerning partitive constructions that indicate that bare nouns in Japanese can be marked with the singular/plural distinction, despite the absence of its overt morphological reflection. The new data set challenges the currently dominant view that bare nouns are number-neutral in classifier languages. A way of accommodating the phenomenon with the syntactically represented singular/plural distinction is provided. Implications for noun classification are also discussed. It is then concluded that it is a mistake to regard Japanese nouns with count semantics as furniture-type nouns and that we need to recognize the familiar mass/count distinction in the language.

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“…In Nez Perce, the trend goes in the opposite direction: even nouns typically lack clear morphosyntactic cues to atomicity (Deal 2016); only adjectives reliably host this morphology. Thus, in Nez Perce, the quantity judgment prompt generally contains atomicity cues only when the noun appears modified by an adjective (Deal 2017 It bears noting that the two exceptions that have been observed to atomicity tracking in the quantity judgment task involve cases without clear morphosyntactic cues to atomicity. In Yudja, all nouns lack atomicity cues.…”

Section: Lima (2014)mentioning

confidence: 95%

Who has more? The influence of linguistic form on quantity judgments

et al. 2017

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Abstract. Quantity judgment tasks have been increasingly used within and across languages as a diagnostic for noun semantics. Overwhelmingly, results show that notionally atomic nouns (Who has more cats?) are counted, while notionally non-atomic nouns (Who has more milk?) are measured by volume. There are two primary outliers to the strict atomicity-tracking pattern. First, some nouns, like furniture, show primarily cardinality-based results in some studies, indicating atomicity, but nevertheless show systematic non-cardinality judgments in other studies, with comparison based instead on value/utility. Second, it has been reported that speakers of the Amazonian language Yudja favor cardinality-based quantity comparison for all nouns regardless of notional atomicity. In the current study, we show that both of these patterns arise in naïve English speakers in the absence of clear linguistic cues to atomicity, and suggest that the absence or mis-diagnosis of linguistic cues may be behind the reported outliers to atomicity-tracking.

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Countability distinctions and semantic variation

Cited by 39 publications

References 34 publications

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

The mass/count distinction in Japanese from the perspective of partitivity

Who has more? The influence of linguistic form on quantity judgments

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