Things and Stuff

The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction

Author: Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier and Halima Husić

Paperback

With contributions from world-renowned researchers, this book delves into how to best describe the phenomena of mass-count distinction.

With contributions from world-renowned scholars, this book explains how both modern linguistics and individual languages differ in their methods for describing two fundamental categories of reality: things and stuff. With its novel take on mass-count distinction, it is essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.

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Summary

With contributions from world-renowned researchers, this book delves into how to best describe the phenomena of mass-count distinction.

Description

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this book explores the relationship between mass and count nouns in a number of syntactic environments, and across a range of languages. It both explains how languages differ in their methods for describing these two fundamental categories of reality, and shows the many ways that modern linguistics looks to describe them. It also explores how the notions of count and mass apply to 'abstract nouns', adding a new dimension to the countability discussion. With its pioneering approach to the fundamental questions surrounding mass-count distinction, this book will be essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.

About the Author

Tibor Kiss has been Professor of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum since 1999. He is also co-editor (with Artemis Alexiadou) of Syntax: Theory and Analysis (2015), and wrote a various papers on problems of the syntax-semantics interface, dealing with quantification and word order, prepositions, non-finite complements, and relative clauses. Francis Jeffry Pelletier has been a joint professor of philosophy, linguistics, and computing science, as well as a Canada Research Chair in cognitive science. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society (Canada). Notable publications include Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems (editor, 1979) and The Generic Book (co-edited with Gregory Carlson, 1995). Halima Husić is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Linguistics Data Science Lab, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her work has focused on semantics including event nominals, definiteness, and the semantic effects of case alternation. In her recently completed dissertation, she discusses the countability of abstract nouns.