Mass Nouns Research Articles

Lexical aspect and number variation in French Complex Event Nominals

In this work, we examine the factors allowing or disallowing French Complex Event Nominals (CENs, i.e. deverbal nominals displaying argument and aspectual structures, Grimshaw 1990) to occur in the plural when denoting a plurality of events. Our claim is that French CENs can occur in the plural in such cases (Meinschaefer 2005; Roodenburg 2006; Sleeman & Brito 2010), and thus behave as count nouns. However, a restricted subclass does not exhibit number variation, similarly to other non-count nouns.To account for the distribution of nominal plurality, we rely on lexical aspect. We show that the CENs that do not admit pluralization are strictly atelic: they nominalize strictly stative verbs or push-verbs (Verkuyl 1993). Conversely, CENs derived from any other aspectual verb class can appear in the plural, even when they nominalize atelic VPs, provided these also have a telic use. This leads to a restatement of the role of boundedness previously invoked to account for the relationship between verbal (a)telicity and nominal [±count] distinction (Bach 1976; Mourelatos 1978; Krifka 1989), that linked the [±count] property of the derived event nominal to the actual (a)telicity of the VP.Since the distribution of plural just described is proper to CENs, which have an internal verbal structure, we suggest that it deserves a syntactic analysis. Our hypothesis is that [–count] CENs derive from verbs that are deprived of AspQP (Borer 1993; 2005). This results in turn in the absence of ClP and NumP in the nominal layers. The absence of ClP accounts for the fact that [–count] CENs do not behave as regular mass nouns.

GRAMMAR MISTAKE OR CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS

The starting point of the article is its title. There are some nouns and adjectives but no verbs in it. Neither main, nor auxiliary verbs. Even though it is a question, the structure does not follow any of the question types either. This makes us think that the title of the article in particular and the headlines in general do not follow the structure of the English sentence. That is a common situation. A lot of headlines in newspapers and on covers of magazines, advertisements or just e-mails do not follow the grammar rules of a language. The Cambridge Dictionary says that headlines often use non-standard grammar and sometimes they are difficult to read. On the one hand, the main features are the use of a series of nouns, ellipsis, lack of articles or verbs (especially the verb to be). Is it a mistake or just a way to attract the reader’s attention? The article aims at providing an analysis of this type of ‘mistakes’ and address this knowledge gap. On the other hand, in order to make the news more dramatic, powerful and persuasive, to make events sound as if they are happening now, headlines commonly use the present simple, even if the article refers to a past event or the to-infinitive form to refer to future events. It is easy to relate the present perfect to the past. Although it is called present, the present perfect is a tense with past-time reference, It refers to actions and events in English that have happened up to now, in the recent past. This is the reason it is often compared to the past simple. But how can we relate the present simple to past actions and events? In formal writing the present simple is also used to refer to events in the past. Yet another ‘mistake’ should be mentioned. Especially the advertisements give the reader the benefit of the doubt. They use grammar items which are not suitable for this very situation. For example, the use of countable and uncountable nouns in English is different in regard to both determiners and verbs. However, they are used interchangeably. A similar ‘mistake’ is made with the plural form of the noun and the possessive (body’s instead of bodies, Victoria’s Secretad). The present study comes to the conclusion that the creative effectiveness of headlines and ads is the reason for all the ‘mistakes’. It is expressed only by key words to grab the attention of the reader.

Reference to kinds in L2 English

This study investigated the acquisition of kind referring noun phrase interpretation in L2 English by learners with Turkish, Arabic and Chinese L1 backgrounds. 37 advanced learners of English with Turkish (10), Arabic (10) and Chinese (10) L1 backgrounds, and 7 native English speakers were recruited. The tasks were a 48-item Fill in the gaps task and a 64-item Acceptability judgment task. The results indicated that: (a) native speakers, and L2 learners mostly produced bare plurals for count nouns and bare singulars for mass nouns for kind reference; (b) L2 learners of English transferred the morphosyntactic manifestation of kind reference from their L1s, substantiating the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996); and (c) the similarity between the participants’ L1s and L2 did not always lead them to produce correct noun forms and articles for kind reference, neither did such a similarity consistently help the learners in their acceptability judgments for kind reference.

The naked ‘duchess’: names are titles

In her recent defense of predicativism for proper names, Delia Graff Fara proposes the following non-metalinguistic being-called condition (BCC) for the applicability of names as predicates: A name ‘N’ is true of a thing if and only if it is called N. The BCC is supposed to hold for names only. In this essay I criticize Fara’s BCC by arguing that the word ‘called’ is ambiguous, and that the BCC holds only for the particular sense of ‘calling’ as naming. I revise accordingly Fara’s BCC and propose in its place a non-metalinguistic being-named condition (BNC). I also argue, against Fara, that being-named conditions are not unique to proper names: they hold for (at least some) mass nouns, common count nouns, as well as for family names, which I distinguish from surnames. Finally, I discuss honorific titles and propose a being-entitled condition according to which a title ‘T’ (when a predicate) is true of a thing just in case it is dubbed T. I conclude the paper with pragmatic, syntactic, as well as semantic considerations in favor of the thesis that names are a subspecies of non-hereditary, honorific titles.

Linguistische Analyseverfahren zur Erfassung der Individual/Massennomen-Distinktion und Kollektiva im Deutschen und Türkischen

Linguistic methods of analysis that allow a categorial classification on the basis of morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria are used for the determination of the count-/mass-noun distinction and collective nouns. The purpose of this study is to clarify whether such categorial assignments are also possible for the German and Turkish language. In the first part of the paper, explanations of some terms ("count nouns", "mass nouns" and "collective nouns") are given. Following up, a categorial classsification of German and Turkish nouns is attempted within the context of the enlisted linguistic methods of analysis (morphological criterion ("quantity plural"T1, "element affinity" T2); syntactic criterion (“use in numeral or measurement constructions" T3, "count nouns not without determinator in NP function (or [_] NP context" T4, "element attribute” or “genitive attribute" T5, "element specification apposition" T6); semantic criterion ("sortal plural" T7) (cf. Kuhn, 1982, s. 84-97). As the basis of the categorical assignments, the differentiations in German are taken into consideration and compared with the corresponding phenomena in Turkish. Unlike German, the Turkish language, however, has a special feature that "reflects a different morphosyntactic implementation of 'multiplicity' in the use of plural forms" (cf. Johanson und Rehbein, 1999, s. vii-xx und translated by N. D.). This peculiarity of the Turkish language is assigned to the linguistic phenomenon "transnumerality". In the languages of the world, there is, besides the marking of the grammatical category number, also a pattern according to which there is no number agreement within the noun phrase. Accordingly, German belongs to the first type of number use, in that it has multiple markings for the plural forms, whereas Turkish can be assigned to the second type. The overarching principle in the grammatical expressions of the Turkish language seems to be the concept of economy, according to which morphological economy is ranked higher than semantic transparency (cf. Ortmann, 2002).

What the progressive aspect tells us about processes

Numerous authors have attempted to carve an ontological distinction between events and processes on the basis of a widely noted linguistic datum involving count and mass nouns, where events are thought to be analogous to countable objects while processes to non-countable stuff. By assessing the most developed of these proposals—that of Helen Steward’s—this paper locates the motivations behind the project of carving some such distinction between events and processes, and proceeds to offer considerations toward an alternative account of processes—one whose ontology is more akin to that of states than it is to stuff.

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward- versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

Aspectual coercion of telic verbs and atelic adverbials in German: Acceptability judgments on sentences with conflicting aspectual information by native speakers

The aim of this paper is to explain differences in the degrees of acceptability of sentences with co-occurring telic verbs and atelic durative time span adverbials. The interpretation of such sentences requires coercion of the aspectual information, solving the semantic mismatch by making the conflicting information compatible. Successful coercion means that a sentence will thereby achieve perfect acceptability, whereas less successful coercion will produce lower degrees of acceptability. The results of 37 participants rating the acceptability of 30 sentences with conflicting aspectual information were as follows: (1) Telic verbs describing a process promote successful coercion. (2) Specific semantic properties of the nominal phrases (NPs) contribute to coercion. Cumulative NPs denoting concrete entities (e.g., bare concrete mass nouns) promote coercion and so give higher acceptability scores. NPs denoting abstract entities promote coercion only when they are definite. The results show that the aspectual interpretation of sentences is supported by processes of semantic enrichment to resolve the co-occurrence of conflicting linguistic expressions. Our study also reveals that we need to address how we can implement contextual information in an experimental set-up to address the remaining gaps in explaining the differences in the acceptability ratings.

Is there a pluralia tantum subcategory of nominal gerunds? Developing Gaeta's notion of morphological differentiation

Inspired by Gaeta's study of morphological distinctiveness as the basis for category formation, this article considers the possibility that by virtue of their invariable suffix -ings English pluralia tantum nominal gerunds (PTNGs) such as surroundings can be regarded as a subcategory of nominal gerunds. It is shown that the set of PTNGs is semantically very disparate with regard to the verb that underwent nominalization in the course of their formation. Differences are observed in a very large corpus with regard to the quantifiers and other items that co-occur with PTNGs, namely quantifiers regularly associated with plural count (e.g. many) or with mass nouns (e.g. much), but there is too much variability among PTNGs for the totality of them to be a candidate for category status.

INTERNALIZATION OF ISLAMIC VALUES INTO ENGLISH TEACHING MEDIA (SONGS)FOR TEACHING ENGLISH IN PESANTREN

This current research is to modify songs for teaching English vocabulary by inserting Islamic values (sholawat) in them. The Hannafin and Peck Model was applied. The first phase reveals thatPesantren are mostly characterized by Islamic values and santris’ main weaknesses concern with basic English vocabularies and pronunciation. In the second phase,the sholawat songs the santris liked were modified to teachirregular verbs and uncountable nouns. The songs were chosen because most of the santris had already been familiar with them. The third indicated that the santris gave positive responses to the songs and could remember the vocabularies easily.

The NP in academic Maltese English

Abstract Despite recent advances, Maltese English remains under-researched as a regional variety of English. This study employs an error analysis approach to identify its nominal characteristics based on the assumption that fossilized learner competences shared by a speech community eventually develop into new dialects and that transfer phenomena play a pivotal role. The study analyses article usage, singular and plural forms and noncount nouns and finds that overuse of the definite article is a likely candidate as a feature of Maltese English.

Individuals and non-individuals in cognition and semantics: The mass/count distinction and quantity representation

Language is a sub-component of human cognition. One important, though often unattained goal for both cognitive scientists and linguists is to explicate how the meanings of words and sentences relate to the more general, non-linguistic, cognitive systems that are used to evaluate whether sentences are true or false. In the present paper, we explore one such relationship: an interface between the linguistic structures referring to individuals and non-individuals (specifically, count-nouns like ‘cows’ and mass-nouns like ‘beef’) and the non-linguistic cognitive systems that quantify and compare number and area. While humans may be flexible in how they use language across contexts, in two experiments using standard psychophysical testing we find that participants evaluate a count-noun sentence via numerical representations and evaluate a corresponding mass-noun sentence via non-numerical representations; consistent with a principled interface between language and cognition for evaluating these terms. This was the case even when the visual display was held constant across conditions and only the noun type was varied, further suggesting an important difference in how area and number, as well as count and mass nouns, are represented. These findings speak to issues concerning the semantics-cognition interface, the mass-count distinction, and the psychophysics of quantity representation.

The mass-count distinction in Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment

This study reports experimental data on the acquisition of the mass-count distinction by Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). While verbal morphosyntax is known to be impaired in SLI, nominal morphosyntax has received less attention. The mass-count distinction provides an interesting test ground: count can have a plural morpheme: bal-en (‘balls’), but mass cannot: *deeg-en (‘doughs’). Flexible nouns can easily occur in either mass or count syntax (pizza/pizza-s). Finally, object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) are syntactically mass, but quantify over individuals, and are hypothesized to have a lexical [+individual] feature (Bale & Barner 2004). Typically developing (TD) Dutch-acquiring children become sensitive to the mass-count distinction around age 6 (van Witteloostuijn 2013).Hypothesizing that the primary impairment of SLI is in morphosyntax, and not in lexical-semantics, we predict that Dutch-speaking children with SLI older than 6 have most problems with the interpretation of flexible nouns (relying solely on morphosyntax), some problems interpreting classical count and mass nouns (supported by convention/world knowledge), and least problems interpreting object–mass nouns (relying solely on their lexical [+individual] feature). Quantity judgments based on count and mass nouns were collected from 28 Dutch children with SLI aged between 6 and 14 years old and 28 individually age-matched TD children. Confirming our predictions, the children with SLI scored significantly lower than their TD controls on flexible nouns, and, albeit to a lesser extent, on classical nouns. This underscores the (nominal) morphological deficit in SLI. In contrast, no difference between groups was found on object-mass nouns.

Second-language processing of English mass-count nouns by native-speakers of Korean

This study deals with the English mass-count distinction and how it cues meaning. 40 native speakers of Korean processed common nouns in their L2 (English) and in Korean. English native speakers performed the same English task. Anglophones individuated both count nouns and mass nouns denoting collections of entities. They were also acutely sensitive to plural-marking as a cue to the meaning of ambiguous “flexible” nouns denoting either bounded entities or substances. Koreans were target-like on 3 classes of English nouns but were insensitive to plural-marking on English flexible nouns. A comparison of English- and Korean-language tasks revealed that Koreans were using the same types of responses on semantically similar Korean and English items, consistent with the hypothesis that they use lexical semantics (not grammar) to arrive at an interpretation. Our study shows that Koreans perform at native-like levels on a judgement task involving the 3 most common classes of English nouns while remaining insensitive to English plural-marking. Learners do not make use of the mass-count syntax of English to interpret common nouns and appear not to have learnt plural-marking.

Referentiality and incompletive reading in Mandarin

As an exception to Krifka’s (1989) famous generalization that a quantized incremental theme always induces an event-homomorphic completive reading, Singh (1991, 1998) observes that in Hindi only the quantized mass noun phrases as the incremental theme entails a completive reading, but unexpectedly quantized count nouns phrases can have an incompletive reading. She proposes that count nouns can introduce a partial thematic relation, whereas mass nouns introduce a total thematic relation. With new data in Mandarin, instead of the mass/count distinction, I argue that referentiality is the crucial factor because the non-culmination readings are only felicitous with the referential objects for consumption verbs in Mandarin.

NPE, gender and the countable/mass distinction

The main purpose of this paper is to present arguments for the existence of a certain relation between formal gender features and the semantic notions ‘count noun’ and ‘mass noun’. In particular, facts relating to how NP ellipsis operates in indefinite DPs in Dutch and Afrikaans are taken to provide evidence for the proposed relation.

The trajectory of φ-features on Old French D and n

AbstractOld French (OF) determiners (D), which are optional, show a three-way split between definite (def), indefinite(indf), and expletive(expl)D. We develop a nano-syntactic analysis of these three paradigms, according to which the nominal spine is associated with a series of functional heads that include Number, Gender, D, and Kase. We test the predictions of the formal analysis with a quantitative analysis of corpus data from two 12thcentury Anglo-Norman texts –Le voyage de saint Brendan(B) andLais de Marie de France(MdF) – which indicates that over a 60-year span, there are changes in the distribution of D. This presents itself in three ways. First, a decline in expletive D inMdFcorrelates with an increase in the use of D with masculine (m) non-count nouns (nNON-CT) Second, whileBlacks an overt indefinite plural (pl) D,MdFhas one in the form ofdes. Third, with count nouns(nCT), while feminine (f) nouns favour the absence of determiners inB, there is no gender effect inMdF. While the first two changes are predicted by the formal analysis, the third is not. More broadly, the results of our quantitative study provide a more nuanced picture of the factors that govern the distribution of D in OF: they confirm that – relative to conditioning the absence of D (D-drop) – definiteness, grammatical function, and number are stable factors, gender is not a stable factor, and word order does not play a significant role.

The Possessive Construction with Cuid 'Part'

Irish makes special use of cuid ‘part’ in the pronominal possessor construction with plural and non-count nouns: e.g. mo chuid eolais ‘my knowledge’, lit. ‘my part of knowledge’. It is argued that cuid is a pseudopartitive marker that explicates the idea of amount of the possessum.

Are superordinates such asfurnitureandbelongingscollective nouns?

AbstractOne area of debate as to the boundaries of the class of “collective nouns” concerns non-count singular nouns such asfurniture, which are typically used for several units of different kinds. Arguments for and against inclusion have been put forward, but ultimately, what has been noted is a number of similarities and differences compared with count collective nouns. This makes both positions as legitimate, especially as collective nouns are a partly heterogeneous class (e.g. only those denoting humans, or sometimes animals, license plural override:the committee were…vs.*the bouquet were…). The present paper addresses the issue from a different angle, comparingfurniturenouns not just with other singular nouns (whether collective or superordinate), but with count nouns in the plural (e.g.toys). This new angle enables us to propose thatfurniturenouns are superordinate hyperonyms ofplural, rather than singular, categories. This notion accounts for all the similarities and differences noted betweenfurniturenouns and count collective nouns, and leads to the conclusion thatfurniturenouns are clearly not collective nouns. The analysis is then extended to non-count plural nouns that denote units (e.g.belongings), which have been neglected, or sometimes rejected on arbitrary grounds. The present study shows that they are not collective nouns either, and that they, too, are superordinates, some of them hyperonyms of plural categories.

The analysis of errors of omission in english narrative composition made by EFL students

This research was done to investigate kinds of errors of omission, classify them, explain the characteristics of the errors and evaluate the errors produced by the English foreign learners. Errors of omission could happen because the learners were still lack of form or grammar that is supposed to have in the sentence but the learners omit it. Writing is the most difficult skill in learning English as what is spoken is different with what is written. The writing skills are complex and certainly difficult to teach, requiring not only of grammatical and theoretical devises but also conceptual and judgmental elements. The research was done by using descriptive method and the data were collected from 20 English Foreign Learners' English Narrative Composition. The results found in the learners' English narrative composition are Omission of "Of" for about 5 errors or 25%, Omission of "Auxiliary" for about 3 errors or 15%, Omission of "Articles" for about 3 errors or 15%, Omission of "Countable and Uncountable Nouns" for about 4 errors or 20%, Omission of "Apostrophe's" for about 3 errors or 15% and Omission of "Preposition" for about 2 errors or 10%.