Abstract
In this paper, we attempt to answer the vexing question why it should be the case that only certain types of noun meanings exhibit a mass/count variation in the lexicalization of their semantic properties, while others do not. This question has so far remained unanswered, or been set aside. We will do so by focusing on the role of context-sensitivity (already highlighted in recent theories of the mass/count distinction), and argue that it gives rise to a conflict between two pressures that influence the encoding of noun meanings as mass or count, one stemming from learnability constraints (reliability) and the other from constraints on informativeness (individuation). This will also lead us to identifying four semantic classes of nouns, and to showing why variation in mass/count encoding is, on our account, to be expected to occur widely in just two of them. Context-sensitivity forces a choice between prioritizing individuation, which aligns with count lexicalization, and prioritizing consistency, which aligns with mass lexicalization.
First, we would like to thank the participants and organizers of the Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation. We especially enjoyed the inspirational and welcoming environment provided by our Georgian friends and colleagues. We are very grateful to Robin Cooper for his invaluable comments and suggestions during the preparation of this manuscript. We also wish to thank the audiences at Type Theory and Lexical Semantics held at ESSLLI 2015 (Barcelona, Spain), Sinn und Bedeutung 20 (Tübingen, Germany) and Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 8 (Cambridge UK). Finally, we thank our colleagues and collaborators in the Department of Linguistics and the affiliated Collaborative Research Center 991 at Heinrich Heine University, and in particular the participants of the Semantics and Pragmatics Exchange (SemPrE) colloquium. This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) CRC 991, Project C09.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to a reviewer who pointed out this formulation.
- 2.
Our association of ground context and counting context is only tentative, however. They may, formally, operate in a similar manner, but there are clear informal differences. For example, Rothstein’s counting contexts are meant to set the ground rules in the sense of determining what count as ‘one’. Chierchia’s ground contexts set the ground rules more in the sense of determining the boundary between the positive extension and the vagueness band.
- 3.
This is a vexed issue, however. Prima facie, rice and lentil-s should be treated similarly, however the mass noun rice should have overlapping generators, but the count noun lentil should have non-overlapping generators.
- 4.
Actually, this issue is also somewhat vexed. Nouns such as lentil cause problems for Landman [12] since, if subparts of lentils are not in the generator set and constitute proper parts of elements of the generator set, then they should not be in the denotation of lentil(s), but this prediction is not accurate. This problem is remedied in Landman [13], where generators are replaced by “bases”.
- 5.
There are also nouns which denote fibrous entities like hair(s), string(s) which, on the one hand seem to pattern with granulars like rice insofar as they denote saliently perceptually distinguishable entities and are lexicalized as mass, but on the other hand, they also pattern with context-sensitive count nouns like fence insofar as what counts as one is contextually determined.
- 6.
Another feature of TTR is that types are inherently intensional. This is because types are themselves viewed as objects to which other objects/situations belong, not merely as sets of objects/situations. As such, two distinct types may be coextensional.
- 7.
This formulation is due to Shalom Lappin p.c.
- 8.
This could equally be achieved using sets. For a set of formal atoms \(\{a,b,c\}\), the domain of Ind entities would be \(\{a,b,c, \{a,b\}, \{a,c\}, \{b,c\}, \{a,b,c\}\}\).
- 9.
As pointed out by a reviewer, a related concept is discussed by Geach [8]. However, Geach’s criteria of identity is not identical with, for example, Krifka’s Natural Unit function.
- 10.
This may not be universally true. For example, grains that come in easily separable halves might have two viable schemas, one which counts halves and one which counts wholes.
- 11.
One possible counter example to this is Brazilian Portuguese which seems to encode mass readings of most or even all object count nouns when used in the bare singular. For example, the bare singular ‘How much book...?’ can get a non-coerced measure (weight) reading. See [16].
- 12.
However, see the caveat about Yudja in Sect. 6.2.
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Sutton, P.R., Filip, H. (2017). A Probabilistic, Mereological Account of the Mass/Count Distinction. In: Hansen, H., Murray, S., Sadrzadeh, M., Zeevat, H. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54332-0_9
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