35.1627, Review: Things and Stuff: Kiss, Pelletier, Husić (eds.) (2023)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1627. Fri May 31 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1627, Review: Things and Stuff: Kiss, Pelletier, Husić (eds.) (2023)

Moderator: Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Justin Fuller <justin at linguistlist.org>

LINGUIST List is hosted by Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences.
================================================================


Date: 31-May-2024
From: Kariema El Touny [k.eltouny at gmail.com]
Subject: Semantics, Syntax: Kiss, Pelletier, Husić (eds.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.3687

EDITOR: Tibor Kiss
EDITOR: Francis  Jeffry Pelletier
EDITOR: Halima Husić
TITLE: Things and Stuff
SUBTITLE: The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Kariema El Touny

SUMMARY

The volume contains papers from the 2018 “The Count-Mass Distinction:
A Linguistic Misunderstanding?” conference at the Ruhr-Universität
Bochum. After an introduction by the editors, the book is divided into
four major parts, with the first part consisting of invited papers
that provide an overview of the essential topics and general claims
about the CMD. Dedicated to specific areas of research, the subsequent
three parts consist of four chapters each that expand or refute claims
made in the first part. This review presents each chapter in turn.

Chapter 1. Editorial Introduction: Background to the Count-Mass
Distinction
Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Tibor Kiss, and Halima Husić

In their introduction, the editors define the Count-Mass Distinction
(CMD) as ‘the morphological and syntactic distinction that can be made
for noun phrases (determined phrases) in a language, and as such
varies from language to language’ (p. 1). They present a general view
of the directions the research in the field is taking, and state that
some areas need further study, such as the case of mass-to-count and
count-to-mass coercion. In this way, they introduce the goal of the
book, which is to find a theory that categorizes count and mass words
and to explain the divergent ways languages treat them.

They give a brief history of the CMD, citing two major works on the
subject: Sweet (1898) and Jesperson (1914, 1924), where the latter has
the greater influence on the topics in this volume. They briefly
present the distinguishing features of the CMD and a short summary of
the articles.

Part 1: Large-Scale Architectures for Count and Mass

Chapter 2. Mass vs. Count: Where Do We Stand? Outline of a Theory of
Semantic Variation
Gennaro Chierchia

Chierchia aims to outline a base-line theory to account for semantic
variation across three types of languages using three phenomena that
exhibit fundamental grammatical changes. The phenomena are: 1)
variation in noun phrases (NPs) combining with numerals, 2) ‘Fake’
mass nouns, and 3) Alternations in noun interpretation between count
and mass.

He builds his research on four elements. The first is language
typology. In Type I, numerals combine directly with some nouns and
need a classifier with others; most Indo-European languages are of
this type. In Type II, numerals do not directly combine with NPs and
the classifier is mandatory; Chinese is of this type. In Type III,
numerals combine with any noun; Indonesian is of this type.

The second is, the concept of ‘cognitively mass/count’, taken from
research by the cognitive psychologists Carey and Spelke (1996). This
research relies on the belief that prior to learning a language
children can distinguish between mass and count concepts on a
cognitive level.

The third is the notion of atomicity, according to which an individual
x with the property P (P-atom) in a world w marks it as singular. For
example, in English, each individual with the property bear
(bear-atom) in any world counts as one.

The fourth is the nature of counting, where the characterizations of
numerals are as follows: 1) numeral + N combinations have a
predictable meaning and quantifier; 2) number markings on numeral + N
combinations vary across languages, 3) the composition of complex
numerals like ‘thirty-three’ should be taken into account when
defining numerals Chierchia ignores the event-argument, considering it
beyond the scope of his paper.

He concludes that semantic variation occurs across languages without
any effect on the underlying logic of the count and mass properties of
nouns.

Chapter 3. Counting, Plurality, and Portions
Susan Rothstein

Rothstein explores the relation between countability and
pluralization. She reviews research by Chierchia (1998a, 2010), where
he argues for an atomic interpretation of count nouns and that
singular-plural morphology is only present in count-mass languages and
is exhibited only in count nouns. If a mass-to-count interpretation
occurs, it is the result of picking a set of discrete atomic entities
in the already lexically plural mass nouns and pluralization closes it
under sum.

She departs from this analysis by examining data from three groups of
languages: 1) English and Hebrew, 2) Yudja and Panará, and 3)
Sakurabiat, Ye’kwana, and Taurepang. In the first group, which
exhibits CMD, pluralized mass nouns denote sums, with a possible
abundance interpretation, and the notion of discrete atomic entity is
only reserved for count nouns. In the second group, where all nouns
combine with numerals, countability is context-dependent. In the third
group, which exhibits CMD, pluralized mass nouns are not countable.

She concludes that pluralization and countability are conceptually
distinct and that cross-linguistic variation lies in how they are
connected.

Chapter 4. Count-Mass Asymmetries: The Importance of Being Count
Jenny Doetjes

Doetjes argues against the implied symmetry in the term count-mass
distinction, and accounts for three asymmetries between count and mass
across linguistic systems. The first is the abundance of grammatical
markers, for example numbers, used with count nouns, vs. the rarity of
such markers with mass nouns. The second  is the insensitivity of
quantity expressions to the possible count meaning of N, for example,
“a lot of” when used with mass and count nouns, in data taken from
English and Yudja. The third is an underlying count meaning in the
Noun across languages. According to the author’s cross-linguistic
study, she concludes that, in a count-meaning context, there exists a
natural atomicity or natural countability in the broader sense.

Chapter 5. Divide and Counter
Hagit Borer and Sarah Ouwayda

Following Borer (2005), Borer and Ouwayda adopt a system where “a
nominal is count or mass in the context of some functional structure”
(p. 115). This structure is called a divider, associated solely with
count Ns. They present an investigation into the properties and
distribution of the dividing morpheme –AH, acting as a classifier in
Lebanese Arabic constructions. They present its behavior when paired
with the plural marker –aat to refute claims (T’sou 1976) that
dividing morphemes do not occur with plural-marking morphemes. They
examine how PL-AH-Ns differ from other plural-marked forms in Arabic
due to a structural distinction between cardinals and quantifiers.

Part 2: Implications from Individual Languages

Chapter 6. Mass-to-Count Shifts in the Galilee Dialect of Palestinian
Arabic
Christine Hnout, Lior Laks, and Susan Rothstein

Hnout, Laks, and Rothstein explore the mass-to-count shift in the
Galilee dialect of Palestinian Arabic (PAG). They document the
phenomenon of the singulative operation in PAG: prior to
pluralization, a singular count N is derived from an unsuffixed,
masculine, mass, or collective N by adding a suffix –a/-e, marking it
feminine and grammatically countable. The operation applies to Ns
denoting solids (bread) or granular substance (rice), but does not
apply to liquids (milk) or powders. There are four types of outcome to
the operation: 1) disjointed arbitrary chunks derived from a substance
with a continuous texture (bread), 2) a set of individual grains
derived from granular substance (rice), 3) an individual derived from
a sˁenf noun (apples), which is a collective noun denoting natural
kinds, 4) a count N with an idiosyncratic interpretation (ice-cube
from the mass N ice). They conclude that this shift is not a case of
contextually-driven coercion.

Chapter 7. Object Mass Nouns as an Arbiter for the Count-Mass Category
Kurt Erbach, Petter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Kathrin Byrdeck

Erbach, Sutton, Filip, and Byrdeck examine the existence of object
mass nouns in Japanese, a classifier language. They characterize
object mass nouns as: 1) genuine mass Ns, e.g.  furniture, that do not
freely admit pluralization, 2) infelicitous with determiners with
count predicates, e.g. many, and 3) felicitous with determiners with
mass predicates, e.g. much. They review the claim in the literature
that the count-mass distinction in classifier languages is encoded in
the syntax and semantics of classifiers. This is evident in
shape-based classifiers not combining with substance-denoting mass Ns,
unless a mass-to-count shift occurs. This reasoning aligns the
count-mass distinction with the substance-object distinction in
classifier languages.

They construct a felicity judgment task to test 44 Ns in Japanese
(discrete individuals, collections of discrete entities, and
undifferentiated stuff) when combined with the determiner ‘nan-byaku
to iu’ (hundreds of), which combines with countable Ns. The result is
the existence of a small set of Ns exhibiting object mass noun
behavior.

Chapter 8. Bare Nouns and the Count-Mass Distinction: A Pilot Study
Across Languages
Kayron Beviláqua and Roberta Pires De Oliveira

Beviláqua and Pires De Oliveira aim to use the results from a study of
bare nouns in comparative sentences (affirmative and interrogative) to
analyze the behavior of the Bare Singular (BS) in Brazilian Portuguese
(BrP). They conduct the study using four languages: English,
Rioplatense Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Cape-Verdean. They use
five levels of noun phrase: the Bare Singular, the Singular Flexible
Noun, the Bare Plural, the plural Flexible Noun, and Mass Nouns. They
follow Chierchia’s (2010, 2015) typology of language and conclude that
the BS in BrP behaves as both mass and count.

Chapter 9. Counting (on) Bare Nouns: Revelations from American Sign
Language
Helen Koulidobrova

Koulidobrova examines CMD in American Sign Language (ASL) using
Chierchia’s (2010, 2015) framework of language typology to determine
to which typology ASL belongs. She concludes that: 1) ASL is not Type
I, a number marking language, due to its lack of clear number marking,
2) ASL is not a Type II, classifier language, due to the adjacency
requirement between the classifier and numeral, unlike Chinese for
example and 3) ASL is a Type III number neutral language with
quantifier-split constructions exhibiting CMD.

Part 3: Compositional Analyses and Theoretical Issues

Chapter 10. Ontology, Number Agreement, and the Count-Mass Distinction
Alan Bale

Bale discusses the interaction between syntactic and semantic theories
of CMD and number marking. He reviews three analyses of CMD
interpretation: 1) there are two separate domains for count and mass
respectively (Link 1983), 2) there is one domain but NPs are assigned
two different semantic types (Rothstein 2010) and 3) there is one
domain and one type, however, count NPs have atomicity features while
mass NPs do not (Chierchia 2010; among others). Using these analyses,
he compares two theories of number: low number theories (Bennett
1974), where number is assigned within the NP, and high number
theories (Sauerland 2003), where number is assigned as a sister node
to the DP. He argues for the latter and gives evidence by examining
competition between singular and plural, DPs and plural agreement, and
number agreement patterns with disjunctive phrases.

Chapter 11. The Semantics of Distributed Number
Myriam Dali and Éric Mathieu

Dali and Mathieu present evidence from Tunisian Arabic (TA) that the
morpho-syntactic plural can occupy two positions in the nominal spine
(lower and higher NumP projections), and apply their findings to
Western Armenian (WA) and Turkish. They use the analysis to argue for
a two-step pluralization process of bare nouns in WA and Turkish.
First, N is made singular under the lower NumP, and then it is
pluralized under the higher NumP, which is an example of morphological
compositionality where one number is built out of another.

Chapter 12. Container, Portion, and Measure Interpretations of
Pseudo-Partitive Constructions
Peter R. Sutton and Hana Filip
Sutton and Filip examine the interpretations of pseudo-partitive
constructions (PPC). Using a dynamic, mereological framework, they
focus on the container+contents readings, where the PPC refers to both
container and contents, and ad hoc measure interpretations, where
reference is to the stuff measured rather than the container. They
conclude that 1) ad hoc measure interpretation blocks anaphoric
reference to a container while licensing reference to the measured
stuff, 2) in the same context, both container+contents readings and ad
hoc measure interpretations refer to the same quantity of stuff, and
3) mass-to-count coercion is more restricted in ad hoc interpretation.

Chapter 13. Overlap and Countability in Exoskeletal Syntax: A
Best-of-Both-Worlds Approach to the Count-Mass Distinction
Hanna De Vries and George Tsoulas

De Vries and Tsoulas aim to create a framework that accounts for
count-mass flexibility across languages. They compare two approaches
to CMD. The first is the lexicalist approach (Borer 2005), which views
count and mass as lexical properties of Ns, and links their
grammatical behavior to how humans perceive and categorize stuff and
objects. They argue against implementing such an approach due to its
shortcomings in explaining several examples of count-mass flexibility,
e.g., Mandarin treating all nouns as mass. The second approach is the
constructionist approach (Landman 2011, 2016), which deals with CMD
using morphosyntactic operations. The drawback to such an approach is
its rigidity in including conceptual factors.

The authors combine the two approaches into an Exoskeletal Iceberg
semantics framework to analyze CMD at the syntax-semantics interface.
They list its advantages as follows: 1) it incorporates human
conceptual categories, e.g., INDIVIDUAL, into morphosyntactic
operations, 2) it accounts for count-mass shifts, and 3) it clarifies
the distinction between the nominal properties of stuff reference,
number neutrality, and non-countability.

Part 4: New Empirical Approaches to the Semantics of the Count-Mass
Distinction

Chapter 14. The Role of Content and Cognition in Countability: A
Psycholinguistic Account of Lexical Distributions
Francesca Franzon, Giorgio Arcara, and Chiara Zanini

Franzon, Arcara, and Zanini study the distribution of Ns in mass and
count contexts. They review formal studies that treat countability as
a binary, lexical feature of N (Chierchia 1998), alongside others that
involve referential and linguistic context in the analysis (Allan
1980; Borer 2005). They also review experimental psycho-linguistic
literature on the subject, stating that the results of these studies
are inconclusive due to their reliance on the judgments of single
native speakers.

They present a study with 126 native speakers to measure the
occurrence of 224 Ns as mass and as count in Italian, focusing on a)
morphological Number and b) the context of occurrence of Ns. The
authors find that frameworks that incorporate context succeed at
explaining the results of their quantitative data.

Chapter 15. Plurality Without (Full) Countability: On Mass-Like
Categories in Lexical Plurals
Peter Lauwers

Lauwers defines lexical plurals as nouns that are morpho-syntactically
marked for plurality. He uses French lexical plurals to prove the
following: 1) lexical plurals exhibit dissociation between plurality
and countability, in which N is plural but cannot be counted, 2) it is
not a CMD dichotomy, but more of a spectrum, in which Ns show degrees
of conceptual individuation and 3) some lexical plurals behave more
like singular mass Ns in the case of coercion mechanisms: the
universal sorter (kinds of N) and the universal packager (portions of
N).

Chapter 16. Determining Countability Classes
Scott Grimm and Aeshaan Wahlang

Grimm and Wahlang review three approaches in the literature to
determining countability classes in English. The first uses syntactic
and/or grammatical criteria (Allan 1980). The second adds semantic
diagnostics. The third groups intuitively similar lexical items into a
set of syntactic and semantic correlates (Wierzbicka 1988). Their
shortcomings lie in using different sets of diagnostics and data for
each study. The authors assess Allan’s study by using machine learning
algorithms, such as gradient boosting and non-parametric clustering
methods, to predict the occurrence patterns of Ns for different
grammatical environments. They use data from four of the five genre
types in the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (Davies
2009) and filter them through the CELEX database (Baayen, Piepenbrock,
and Gulikers 1996) to ensure data quality.

They conclude that: 1) nominal behavior regarding countability is more
varied than it is presented in previous studies, 2) the bare plural as
a diagnostic is crucial in predicting countability and 3) there are
degrees of countability detected through different grammatical
environments.

Chapter 17. Polysemy and the Count-Mass Distinction: What Can We
Derive from a Lexicon of Count and Mass Senses?
Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Halima Husić

Kiss, Pelletier, and Husić discuss the topics of lexical variation and
lexical ambiguity in relation to the CMD. They state that research in
variation is limited due to the regular use of a small, fixed set of
nouns. They discuss two cases dealing with ambiguity. One is the
concept of dual-life nouns, where N is both mass and count and its use
is linked to context. The other is a set of countability shifts:
grinding, packaging, and sorting.

They introduce the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL) (Kiss,
Pelletier, and Stadtfeld 2014; Kiss et al. 2016), which is a lexicon
of approximately 11,000 noun-sense pairs assigning each noun a set of
meanings and countability classes. By using BECL: 1) they distinguish
four types of ambiguity, 2) they refute existing research (e.g. Borer
2005) that bases CMD solely on syntactic contexts, 3) they show that
there are more count noun types than mass ones and 4) they show that
count-to-mass shifts are more frequent than mass-to-count shifts.

EVALUATION

The book is a valuable resource for researchers on the subject of CMD
in particular and semantics and language typology in general. In their
review of the relevant literature, the authors provide their
observations on areas that are open for further research or recognize
a linguistic phenomenon that could be better explained with newly
created frameworks. They implement their own extensive studies (as in
chapters 7, 8, and 14) and/or innovative methods (as in chapter 16) to
draw conclusions that either conform to or depart from existing
theories.

A salient feature of the book is the number of languages and language
varieties (67) used. The research ranges from applying new methods on
a well-researched language, such as English (as in chapters 16 and
17), to creating frameworks that could analyze CMD across languages
(as in chapter 13), to taking evidence from one language variety and
applying it to others (as in chapter 11).

The book provides state-of-the-art research in CMD, the results of
which could go beyond the phenomena studied. As such, the work might
seem unconventional at first glance, with authors intentionally
limiting the scope of their research (e.g., in chapter 3). In this
regard, the authors made sure they detailed their goals and the scope
of their studies from the beginning. In addition, in their concluding
remarks, they would occasionally raise additional questions not
covered by their work and invite others to answer them (as in chapter
7).

REFERENCES
Allan, K. (1980). Nouns and countability. Language, 56: 541-67.
Baayen, R., R. Piepenbrock, and L. Gulikers. (1996). Celex2.
Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Bennett, M. (1974). Some extensions of a Montague fragment of English.
PhD dissertation, UCLA.
Borer, H. (2005). Structuring Sense I. In Name Only. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Carey, S. and E. Spelke. (1996). Science and core knowledge.
Philosophy of Science, 63: 515-33.
Chierchia, G. (1998a). Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of
“semantic parameter”. In S. Rothstein (ed.) Events and Grammar.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 53-104.
 _____    (2010). Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation.
Synthèse, 174: 99-149.
  _____   (2015). How universal is the mass/count distinction? Three
grammars of counting. In Y. Li and W. Tsai (eds.), Chinese Syntax: A
Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
147-77.
Davies, M. (2009). The 385+ million word corpus of Contemporary
American English (1990-2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic
insights. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14: 159-90.
Jesperson, O. (1914). A Modern English Grammar on Historical
Principles, Part 2. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Reprinted with alterations and additions: N. Haislund (ed.). London:
Allen & Urwin, 1948.
 _____  (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen & Urwin.
Kiss, T., F.J. Pelletier, H. Husić, J. Poppek, and N. Simunic. (2016).
A sense-based lexicon of count and mass expressions: The bochum
countability lexicon. In N. Calzolari et al. (eds.). Proceedings of
the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evolution
(LREC-16). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp.
2810-14
Kiss, T., F.J. Pelletier, and T. Stadtfeld. (2014). Building a
reference lexicon for countability in English. In N. Calzolari et al.
(eds.). Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evolution (LREC-14). Paris: European Language Resources
Association (ELRA), pp. 995-1000.
Landman, F. (2011). Count nouns – mass nouns, neat nouns – mess nouns.
Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication,
6.
 _____     (2016). Iceberg semantics for count nouns and mass nouns:
The evidence from portions. The Baltic International Yearbook of
Cognition, Logic and Communication, 11.
Link, G. (1993). The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A
lattice-theoretical approach. In R. Bäuerle, C. Schwarze, and A. von
Stechow (eds.), Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language. Berlin:
de Gruyter, pp. 302-23.
Rothstein, S. (2010). Counting and the mass/count distinction. Journal
of Semantics, 27: 343-97.
Sauerland, U. (2003). A new semantics for number. In R. Youn and Y.
Zhou (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 13).
Ithaca, NY: LSA and CLC Publications, pp. 258-75.
Sweet, H. (1898). A New English Grammar, Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
T’sou, B. (1976). The structure of nominal classifier systems. In P.
Jenner, S Starosta, and L. Thompson (eds.), Austroasiatic Studies, Vol
2. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, pp. 1215-48.
Wierzbicka, A. (1988). Oats and wheat: Mass nouns, iconicity, and
human categorization. In idem, The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, pp. 499-560.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kariema El Touny holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics and a
Cambridge CELTA. Her interests include (but are not limited to):
Syntax, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Arabic Dialectology,
Typology, Theory Construction, and Teaching English as a Second
Language. She has presented and published her research on Cairene
Arabic syntax within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program and
Optimality Theory.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1627
----------------------------------------------------------