The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched 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 those gaps.
This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting 'more than one' entity. This semantic feature approach to plurality, which cuts across number, the count/non-count ...distinction, and lexical/NP levels, reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration, which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns.
Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs Doris Gerland, Christian Horn, Anja Latrouite, Albert Ortmann / Doris Gerland, Christian Horn, Anja Latrouite, Albert Ortmann
2014, 2021, 2014-11-05
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The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns ...and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences.
Addressing non-quantifiable nouns is an indispensable step to figure out numeral classifiers and (bare) nouns in Mandarin Chinese. Recognizing the dearth of studies on Mandarin non-quantifiable ...nouns, we initiate the work by discussing their denominations and definitions from a syntactic-semantic perspective. Subsequently, offering a huge and systematic set of linguistic examples, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of six typical types of non-quantifiable nouns: proper nouns, relative existence-denoting nouns, counting/measuring-denoting nouns, common nouns with uniqueness, nouns with morphemes in special relation, and idiomatic nouns. Based on the above analysis, we propose three fundamental semantic features of being a non-quantifiable noun, i.e. uniqueness, relativity, and counting/measuring-denoting feature, among which, the last two features can be attributed to the first one, that is, uniqueness. Furthermore, we divide uniqueness into absolute one and relative one based on whether the referents of non-quantifiable nouns are independent of contexts, and into external one and internal one based on where these referents are quantified.
This article reports on a typological study of the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun, based on a sample of 576 languages. I propose a set of five surface principles which interact ...to predict the relative frequencies of the different orders of these four elements, whereby the more principles an order conforms to, the more frequent it will be. I provide evidence that the relative frequencies of the different orders can only be described and explained in terms of semantic notions of demonstrative, numeral, and adjective, independent of their syntactic realization, and not in terms of syntactic categories. I compare my approach to a generative account of the same phenomenon by Cinque (2005). I argue that my approach accounts for the relative frequencies of the different orders better than Cinque’s in a number of respects.
The DP-hypothesis as proposed in Abney (1987) is nowadays generally taken for granted in formal syntactic work. In this paper I will show that a surprising number of arguments that have been provided ...in the literature are not conclusive. Many rest on purely theory-internal premises and thus lose their force given the developments within syntactic theory over the last decades. Others are largely based on presumed parallelisms between the noun phrase and the clause. In practically all cases a reasonable reanalysis within the NP-hypothesis is possible. Similarly, I will show that the few arguments in favor of the NP-hypothesis that there can be found are also inconclusive. Instead I will establish solid criteria for headedness and explore their implications for the NP vs. DP debate. I will show that the fact that the features of the head are present on the maximal projection makes testable predictions when the noun interacts with noun phrase external heads. I will first show that data from selection favor the DP-hypothesis (contrary to previous claims) since one needs to be able to syntactically select both DPs and bare nouns/NPs. Second, I will present a new argument in favor of the DP-hypothesis based on data from hybrid agreement in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. The phenomenon crucially requires D-elements to be closer to agreement targets outside the noun phrase than the noun itself. This follows if DP dominates NP but not vice versa.
This essay is about the unique role of proper nouns at the intersection of knowledge and property, both tangible and intangible. Nouns are central to any form of property and credit, from a person’s ...name listed on a property deed or copyright registration, to the name of an artist to whom a work is attributed, or that of a scientist after whom a discovery or theory is named. And names can also be found on the other end of the property spectrum, not as the names of authors and owners but as objects of property, as in the case of brand names. Here I trace some of the functions of these names as they move across different scenarios of knowledge-making and property-making, focusing on some of the effects those trajectories are having in the contemporary technosciences as they bring together the function of the author and that of the brand.
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The aim of this paper is to highlight the diffrences between the so-called general vs. unspecified nouns through the so-called general human nouns (man, individual, person, ...) generally left out of ...the debate. We compare these three nominal subcategories on the basis of criteria that are rarely used in the literature concerning them: in addition to usage and frequency, we differentiate them on the basis of their degree of abstraction, the semantic variations they manifest according to discourse genres and their discursive functions, and according to their potential for construction and grammaticalization. We thus show that only certain uses of these names, whether they are NHG, NG or Nss, "act as" NG, Nss, etc., and that they are not used in the same way as NG, NG or Nss.
The present study investigates the use of English verb‐noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that ...consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native speakers of English. We retrieved the 220 most frequently occurring nouns in the LOCNESS corpus and in the learner corpus, created concordances for them, and extracted verb‐noun collocations. Subsequently, we performed two types of comparisons: learners were compared with native speakers on the frequency of collocation use and learners were compared with other learners of different second‐language proficiencies on the frequency and correctness of collocations. The data revealed that learners at all three proficiency levels produced far fewer collocations than native speakers, that the number of collocations increased only at the advanced level, and that errors, particularly interlingual ones, continued to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency. We discuss the results in light of the nature of collocations and communicative learning and suggest some pedagogical implications.
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