Count and mass across languages ed. by Diane Massam (review)

During the past decade there has been a growing interest in crosslinguistic variation in the domain of the count/mass distinction. Since Chierchia’s influential work on parametric differentiation of the distinction in the late 1990s (Chierchia 1998a,b), a large amount of new crosslinguistic data has become available, revealing the complexity of the question as to how to characterize linguistic variation in this domain. This collection of papers addresses many of the issues that are currently at the center of interest. The scope of the volume is very broad, both in the choice of languages that are discussed and in the linguistic subfields that are represented. The result is a book that, by means of its variety, gives a good overview of phenomena that should be taken into account in order to gain a better understanding of the various linguistic reflexes of the conceptual distinction between count and mass in the languages of the world.

The book starts with a comprehensive introduction by Jila Ghomeshi and Diane Massam, summarizing the contributions of the volume, while commenting on the most important issues in current research on count and mass. The authors signal in particular that even though there are no reasons to doubt that the conceptual difference between count and mass is available to all humans, the way this difference is reflected by grammars and the lexicon varies substantially across languages.

In the first paper, Francis Jeffry Pelletier sets out the main challenges for a formalization of the count/mass distinction in English. If count and mass are encoded lexically as syntactic features of nouns, one runs into the problem that nouns are usually not exclusively mass or count (e.g. chocolate(s)). By contrast, if count and mass are semantic features, one runs into the problem of mismatches between the meanings of nouns and their grammatical behavior, often discussed in relation to nouns such as furniture (semantically count but syntactically mass) and pairs of count and mass nouns with similar reference (baklava/brownies, knowledge/beliefs). Based on this, Pelletier proposes that the lexicon is blind to the distinction between count and mass. A noun such as chocolate has a denotation that comprises both chocolates and portions of chocolate-stuff. The combination of count syntax and a noun activates a semantic rule that deletes the mass part of the meaning of the noun (see p. 19). The approach avoids massive ambiguity in the lexicon, but nouns such as furniture still need to be treated in a special way.

Elizabeth Cowper and Daniel Currie Hall provide a possible account of these nouns, cast in the distributed morphology framework. They share Pelletier’s assumption that nouns are not marked as either count or mass in the lexicon. However, furniture is claimed to spell out as a structure that contains both a noun and the syntactic feature ‘#’ (which stands for [+count] in their system). The lexically driven presence of this feature in the syntactic structure makes it impossible to add the feature another time in a separate projection, thus explaining the incompatibility of furniture with count syntax. Crosslinguistic applications of their theory are illustrated on the basis of a few small case studies (‘apparent’ plural markers in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, and ‘apparent classifiers’ in Persian).

Haike Wiese treats nouns such as furniture and footwear as so-called transnumerals. A transnumeral is defined as a noun that does not need plurality for plural reference (this phenomenon is also known as ‘general number’ and ‘number neutrality’), and in many languages this holds for all nouns. Wiese discusses several cases of transnumerality (Mandarin, Persian, Hungarian), focusing on crosslinguistic similarities. In particular, the combination of a plural marker and a transnumeral noun usually leads to special meaning effects, adding for instance a meaning component ‘many’ or ‘varied’, and the plural marker may lose its plural meaning when combined with a...