Speaker: Seva Masliukov (MIT)
Title: Selective access to atoms and a gap in the theories of the mass/count contrast
Time: Wednesday, October 21, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Most theories of the mass vs count contrast assume some version of a three-way split between count nouns like apple, object-level mass nouns like furniture that refer to discrete entities but are number-neutral and not directly «countable», and substance-level mass nouns like water that do not have clear minimal parts in their denotation.
The goal of this talk is to bring attention to another subgroup of nouns that rather stably map to mass crosslinguistically granular nouns like sand, salt, rice etc. Ontologically speaking, they clearly have natural atoms in their denotation, which can be «extracted» both lexically, as in a grain of sand, or morphologically, as in tywod sand <=> tywod-yn a grain of sand (Welsh).
I aim to show, mostly building on data from Welsh and Russian, that despite having atomic reference on some level, these nouns severely restrict access to the minimal parts in their denotation. I will further argue that this behavior of granular nouns generally presents a problem for existing accounts of the mass/count distinction and suggest ingredients for a solution.