Objects and the Grammar of Countability: 18 (Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics)

This book proposes an object-centred and contextualist account of the count/mass distinction.The main empirical finding is that there is a connection between variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns across and within languages and the ways in which mass or count nouns can diverge from manifesting the canonical grammatical reflexes expected of the count/mass distinction in a given language.Assuming compositional semantics enriched with Classical Extensional Mereology, Peter Sutton and Hana Filip propose that mass-count pairs of nouns (across and within languages) lexicalize the same number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects, which comprises not only one discrete entity separate from other entities, but also a discrete entity based on its affordances and topological properties.For a concrete common noun to be grammatically count, as needed in counting and quantificational constructions, it must specify a quantized set of objects relative to a context of individuati