Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Thinking about the Mass/Count Distinction | ||
| Conférencier | Jeffry Pelletier (University of Alberta) | ||
| Date | mardi 18 février 2014 | ||
| Heure | 12h15 | ||
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) | ||
| Description | Some have said that the mass/count distinction is fundamental in “number marking languages” (such as the European languages). Others have claimed that it is merely an accidental linguistic marker, on a par with gender marking. This dispute is partially fuelled by confusion over the status of count/mass as a syntactic distinction or as a semantic distinction. I will rehearse the relevant data (especially in English, but with some cross-linguistic remarks also), and offer a theory that seems to accommodate the data. I also consider a number of other theories for this same data, and close with a question of whether there is really any empirical difference among all these apparently different theories. Some of these concerns arise from considerations raised in analyzing data that arises in the course of my Alexander von Humboldt prize to annotate and analyze the American National Corpus for occurrences of nouns that are mass vs. count.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~francisp
Attached below, you will find the slides from the presentation and the paper related to it. Publication details for the paper: F.J. Pelletier (2012) “Lexical Nouns are Neither Mass nor Count, but they are Both Mass and Count” in D. Massam (ed.) A Cross-Linguistic Exploration of the Count-Mass Distinction (Oxford: OUP), pp. 9-26. |
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