Mass And Count In Linguistics Philosophy And Cognitive Science

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).

With philosophical and linguistic semanticists on the one side and cognitive and developmental psychologists on the other, questions in the semantic and logical theories of generic statements that employ mass terms by looking to the cognitive abilities of speakers and of child language-learners are discussed.

With contributions from world-renowned researchers, this book delves into how to best describe the phenomena of mass-count distinction.

An Introduction to Lexical Semantics provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of lexical semantics, analysing the major lexical categories in English: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions. The book illustrates step-by-step how to use formal semantic tools. Divided into four parts, covering the key aspects of lexical semantics, this book: introduces readers to the major influential theories including the syntax-lexical semantics interface theory by Levin and Rappaport and Pinker, the generative lexicon theory by Pustejovsky and formal semantic analyses discusses key topics in formal semantics including metonymy, metaphor and polysemy illustrates how to study word meaning scientifically by discussing mathematical notions applied to compositional semantics. Including reflection questions, summaries, further reading and practice exercises for each chapter, this accessible guide to lexical semantics is essential reading for advanced students and teachers of formal semantics.

In Europe, and later in the United States, the revitalization of the philosophy of language emerged from the need to address certain perplexities concerning formal disciplines and to work out certain complexities found within philosophy. In Uruguay, however, philosophy of language became limited to a meta-theory about the basic concepts of language. Edited by Carlos Enrique Caorsi and Ricardo J. Navia, Philosophy of Language in Uruguay: Language, Meaning, and Philosophy demonstrates the different directions in which philosophy of language has developed in Uruguay in the last twenty years, giving a representative picture of how philosophical approaches from a linguistic perspective have developed in this Latin American country. Uruguayan philosophy has a very small international presence, but it has long included works within the philosophical explorations of language worthy of being better known. The contributors dissect these explorations through epistemology, linguistics, argumentation, and cognitive sciences to discover how philosophers of language such as Carlos Vaz Ferreira have grown to understand the complexities of language and how it has affected us today.

The book is an investigation of the semantics of numericals, counting and measuring, and its connection to the mass/count distinction from a theoretical and crosslinguistic perspective. It reviews some recent major linguistic results in these topics, and presents the author's new research including in-depth case studies of a number of typologically unrelated languages.

"Metaphysical and ontological debates - debates about what exists and the nature of reality - have long been among the most discussed topics in philosophy. However, some argue that ontological debates are non-substantive, pointless, trivial, incoherent, or impossible. Debates about whether tables exist, or about the nature of reality, are taken to be defective in some way. This has led to a burgeoning literature studying the nature of metaphysical and ontological disputes themselves. A prominent line of argument in that literature has focused on questions concerning the language in which metaphysical disputes are conducted. Is there a 'fundamental' or 'best' language for ontology, or does the nature of language render metaphysical and ontological disputes non-substantive? This volume brings together new work from established and emerging authors on a range of questions relating to the relationship between language and ontology. More specifically, essays in this volume consider, amongst others, the following topics: whether there can be an 'objectively best' or privileged language of ontology; how we might compare languages to see which language is the language of ontology; whether positing an 'objectively best' language is required of a substantive realist metaphysics; whether metaphysical debates are meaningless; the role of existence and truth in ontological theorising; whether metaphysical claims should be interpreted as attempts to express truths about the nature of reality; and the relationship between natural language and theoretical metaphysics. Collectively, these essays advance a range of debates in metametaphysics and metaontology, and will be an invaluable resource for students and academics interested in the relationship between metaphysics and language"--