Lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic sources of countability: An experimental exploration of the mass-count distinction [post]

Mahesh Srinivasan, David Barner
2018 unpublished
In the present chapter, we provide an overview of this remarkable progress, and how the mass-count distinction provides a way forward for understanding other domains of linguistic meaning, and a model for interdisciplinary language research. In this chapter, we focus on the semantic notion of countability. In the first part of the paper, we begin by sketching a history of how countability has been measured in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, and what the sum of this evidence suggests
more » ... ut its representation both at the lexical and syntactic levels. In the second part of the chapter we argue that a complete model of the compositional semantics of the mass-count distinction ultimately depends on a theory of lexical concepts, and how lexical items encode criteria for individuation (or countability). We argue that this problem remains unsolved in the current literature in large part because theories of concepts attempt to explain too much, and that some of the most difficult phenomena are explained when lexical meanings are enriched via pragmatic contrast. To make this case, we present evidence from children's surprising failures to count whole objects until relatively late in development.
doi:10.31234/osf.io/374ca fatcat:srcwdduhzvamljvnzsmemecqxa