Overview

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (#two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of view, touching also on issues in acquisition and processing. The volume also significantly contributes to our cross-linguistic knowledge, as it includes chapters with a focus on Blackfoot, Cantonese, Dagaare, English, Halkomelem, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Mandarin, Ojibwe, and Persian, as well as discussion of several other languages including Armenian, Hungarian, and Korean. The overall consensus of this volume is that while the general concepts of count and mass are available to all humans, forms of grammaticalization involving number, classifiers, and determiners play a key role in their linguistic treatment, and indeed in whether these concepts are grammatically expressed at all. This variation may be reflect the fact that count/mass is just one possible realization of a deeper and broader concept, itself related to the categories of nominal and verbal aspect.

Full Product Details

Author:   Diane Massam (Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Volume:   42
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 23.30cm
Weight:   0.500kg
ISBN:  

9780199654284

ISBN 10:   019965428
Pages:   332
Publication Date:   13 September 2012
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

1: Jila Ghomeshi and Diane Massam: The Count Mass Distinction: Issues and Perspectives 2: Francis Jeffry Pelletier: Lexical Nouns are Both +MASS and +COUNT, but They are Neither +MASS nor +COUNT 3: Elizabeth Cowper and Daniel Currie Hall: Aspects of Individuation 4: Heike Wiese: Collectives in the Intersection of Mass and Count Nouns: A Cross-Linguistic Account 5: Scott Grimm: Individuation and Inverse Number Marking in Dagaare 6: Ileana Paul: General Number and the Structure of DP 7: Saeed Ghaniabadi: Plural Marking Beyond Count Nouns 8: Solveiga Armoskaite: Aspectual Effects of a Pluractional Suffix: Evidence From Lithuanian 9: Martina Wiltschko: Decomposing the Mass/count Distinction: Evidence from Languages that Lack it 10: Eric Mathieu: On the Mass/count Distinction in Ojibwe 11: Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng: Counting and Classifiers 12: Niina Ning Zhang: Countability and Numeral Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese 13: Alan C. Bale and David Barner: Semantic Triggers, Linguistic Variation, and the Mass-Count Distinction 14: Natalie M. Klein, Greg N. Carlson, Renjie Li, T. Florian Jaeger, and Michael K. Tanenhaus: Classifying and Massifying Incrementally in Chinese Language Comprehension References Index

Reviews

Author Information

Diane Massam is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto where she served as Chair of Linguistics from 2002 to 2008. Her research focus is on syntactic theory, in the areas of argument structure, case, predication, and word order, working mainly on Niuean, a Polynesian language. She is the co-editor of Ergativity: Emerging issues (Springer 2006) and has published papers in many journals such as Lingua, Oceanic Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, English Language and Linguistics, and Syntax. She has held several research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was co-editor of Squibs for Linguistic Inquiry (1998-2002), honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland (2001), visiting professor at Harvard University (2006), and an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2010).

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions