A Piece of Cheese, a Grain of Sand: The Semantics of Mass Nouns and Unitizers

Title
A Piece of Cheese, a Grain of Sand: The Semantics of Mass Nouns and Unitizers
Publication Date
2010
Author(s)
Goddard, Cliff
Editor
Editor(s): Francis Jeffry Pelletier
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Place of publication
New York, United States of America
Edition
1
Series
New directions in cognitive science
UNE publication id
une:6865
Abstract
In her classic paper "Oats and Wheat: Mass Nouns, Iconicity and Human Categorization," Anna Wierzbicka (1988) argued the case for the existence of numerous, subtly different, subclasses of mass nouns and postulated detailed explanatory links between underlying conceptualizations and grammatical behaviors. She also stressed the partly language-specific character of these subclasses and suggested that differences between languages are often related to culture (e.g., connected with different eating and food preparation practices). In this study, I aim to extend and improve on Wierzbicka's arguments and analyses, concentrating on concrete mass nouns in English. The two overriding points of the entire study are that the formal linguistic properties of mass nouns are systematically correlated with their conceptual content, and that this conceptual content can be identified with rigor and precision using appropriate methods of linguistic semantics. The analytical framework is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) system of lexical semantic representation (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002; Wierzbicka 1996).
Link
Citation
Kinds, Things and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics, p. 132-165
ISBN
0195382897
9780195382891
Start page
132
End page
165

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