Separating the chaff from the oats: Evidence for a conceptual distinction between count noun and mass noun aggregates

Journal of Memory and Language

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 371-394

  Middleton, Erica L ^a   Wisniewski, Edward J ^b   Trindel, Kelly A ^b   Imai, Mutsumi ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO   (United States)

^c KEIO UNIVERSITY   (Japan)

Author keywords

Cognitive individuation; Concept; Count noun; Individual; Mass noun; Number; Syntax

Indexed keywords

EID: 2442618367     PISSN: 0749596X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2004.02.005     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Allan, K. (1980). Nouns and countability. Language, 56, 541-547.
2. Bloom, P. (1990). Semantic structure and language development. Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
3. Bloom, P. (1994). Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals. Lingua, 92, 297-329.
4. Bloom, P. (1996). Possible individuals in language and cognition. Psychological Science, 5(3), 90-94.
5. Bloom, P., & Kelemen, D. (1995). Syntactic cues in the acquisition of collective nouns. Cognition, 56, 1-30.
6. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Holt & Co, pp. 266-268.
7. Cheng, C. (1973). Comments on Moravcsik's Paper. In Hintikka et al. (Eds.), Approaches to natural language (pp. 286-288). Dordrecht: Reidel.
8. Corbett, G. (2000). Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Gleason, H. A. (1969). An introduction to descriptive linguistics. London: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
10. Gordon, P. (1985). Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The case of the count-mass distinction. Cognition, 20, 209-242.
11. Grandy, R. G. (11973). Comments on Moravcsik's Paper. In Hintikka et al. (Eds.), Approaches to natural language (pp. 295-300). Dordrecht: Reidel.
12. Imai, M. (1999). Constraint on word-learning constraints. Japanese Psychological Research, 41(1), 5-20.
13. Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169-200.
14. Langacker. R. W. (1987). Nouns and verbs. Language, 63, 53-94.
15. Laycock, H. (1979). Theories of matter. In F. Peletier (Ed.), Mass terms: Some philosophical problems. Dordrecht: Reidel.
16. Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things: A study of human learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
17. Markman, E. M. (1985). Why superordinate category terms can be mass nouns. Cognition, 19, 31-53.
18. Markman, E. M. (1990). Constraints children place on word meaning. Cognitive Science, 14, 57-77.
19. McArthur, T. (1981). Longman lexicon of contemporary English. Harlow: Longman.
20. McPherson, L. (1991). A little goes a long way: Evidence for a perceptual basis of learning for the noun categories COUNT and MASS. Journal of Child Language, 18(2), 315-338.
21. Mufwene, S. (1984). The count-mass distinction and the English lexicon. In Testen, Mishra, & Drogo (Eds.), Papers from the parasession on lexical semantics. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
22. Palmer, F. R. (1981). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Quine, V. W. (1989). Philosophy: Mind, brain and behavior. InA. J. Brownstein,. Progress in behavioral studies (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
24. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1972). A grammar of contemporary English. New York: Seminar Press, pp. 169-171.
25. Soja, N. N. (1992). Inferences about meanings of nouns: The relationship between perception and syntax. Cognition, 7, 29-45.
26. Ware, R. (1979). Some bits and pieces. In F. Peletier (Ed.), Mass terms: Some philosophical problems (pp. 15-29). Dordrecht: Reidel.
27. Whorf, B. L. (1962). In John Carroll (Ed.), Language, thought, and reality (pp. 140-141). New York/London: Wiley.
28. Wierzbicka, A. (1988). The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
29. Wisniewski, E. J., Imai, M., & Casey, L. (1996). On the equivalence of superordinate concepts. Cognition, 60, 269-298.
30. Wisniewski, E. J., Lamb, C. A., & Middleton, E. L. (2003). On the conceptual basis for the count and mass noun distinction. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5/6), 583-624.