Count–Mass Asymmetries: The Importance of Being Count
Jenny Doetjes · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021
The term count/mass distinction, despite its success as a name for a domain of research, suggests a symmetry between count and mass that is not supported by cross-linguistic data. A first asymmetry is related to the grammatical encoding of count vs. mass. A second asymmetry between count and mass is related to the sensitivity of quantity expressions to count and mass meaning and count morphology. A third asymmetry concerns possible meanings of nouns. Whereas there is strong evidence that an opposition between count and mass meanings plays an important role in the lexicon even of languages that seem at first mass-only, there do seem to exist count-only languages. The second part of the paper will consider count meanings across languages. What types of meanings are count? What are reliable diagnostics for count meaning? Are there differences in this respect between obligatory number marking languages (also commonly called ‘mass/count languages’) and languages that do not have obligatory number?