Objects and the Grammar of Countability

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book proposes an object-centred and contextualist account of the count/mass distinction, defined in mereological terms. The main empirical finding is that there is a connection between variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns across and within languages and the ways in which nouns, mass or count, can diverge from manifesting the canonical grammatical reflexes expected of the count/mass distinction in a given language. No extant count/mass theory can motivate this striking connection. It is proposed that mass -count pairs of nouns (across and within languages) lexicalize the same number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects, defined both in mereotopological and affordance-based terms. Context plays a crucial role since it influences different ways of viewing the entities in the extension of a noun and so what counts as ‘one’ for that noun in that context. The book proposes a system of three perceptual-interactive constraints, based upon how one perceives and interacts with objects, that predicts the propensity for a core property that is satisfied by objects to nonetheless be lexicalized as mass. These constraints are also key to explaining variation in the count/mass lexicalization patterns of such properties. The book also shows how the extent to which a core property can satisfy these constraints can be estimated from a corpus, and how these corpus measures can be used to model variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns. The main data rely on concrete common nouns in number-marking languages, namely, Czech, English, Finnish, and German, but the account is also extended to abstract nouns, and to two non-number-marking languages, Mandarin and Yudja.</jats:p>