Chapter 14 - Relations Between Language and Thought: Individuation and the Count/Mass Distinction

Abstract

What is the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive categories? How does language acquisition (specifically, the acquisition of grammatical categories) draw on prelinguistic concepts? Is it possible, as recent commentators have argued, that the acquisition of linguistic categories itself affects nonlinguistic conceptual categories? This paper addresses these questions by focusing on the grammatical distinction between count and mass nouns and its relation to the distinction between objects and stuff. We first ask whether learning count/mass syntax may help children think about objects and stuff in ways that were not antecedently available to them. We also ask whether cross-linguistic differences in marking count/mass status affect the nonlinguistic individuation criteria used by speakers of different languages. We review a number of recent findings that have been interpreted as showing such effects of count/mass syntax on nonlinguistic cognition and argue that they do not conclusively demonstrate language-specific influences on mental life.