Abstract
We argue that in Hungarian notionally count, singular nouns like könyv (‘book’), toll (‘pen’), and ház (‘house’) are semantically number-neutral (see also Farkas and de Swart (2010)). This departs from the view that such nouns are dual-life with respect to being count or mass, such as brick or stone in English, as recently argued by Rothstein (2017) and Schvarcz and Rothstein (2017), who rely on two assumptions: that pseudo-partitive (measure) NPs require mass predicates denoting measured entities (Rothstein 2011); and that classifiers modify mass nouns (Chierchia 1998, 2010). We provide evidence against these two assumptions and argue that, together with (i) the commonly accepted analysis of measure DPs on which they require cumulative predicates to denote what is measured (i.a, Krifka 1989; Filip 1992, 2005; Nakanishi 2003; Schwarzschild 2006; and (ii) for an analysis of classifiers (Krifka 1995; Sudo 2017) in which they combine with numerical expressions rather than nouns, a number neutral analysis of Hungarian notionally count, singular nouns covers a wider range of data than a dual-life analysis does. We build on the use of context to specify what counts as one (Landman 2011; Rothstein 2010; Sutton and Filip 2016) and the analyses of counting and measuring in Filip and Sutton (2017) yielding a novel analysis in which Hungarian has many count nouns and many mass nouns, rather than many dual-life and mass nouns, but few count nouns.
First, we would like to thank the participants and organizers of the Twelfth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation. We especially enjoyed the inspirational environment and welcoming hospitality provided by our Georgian friends and colleagues. We are very grateful to Zsofia Gyarmathy and Karoly Varasdi for their help with Hungarian data during the preparation of this manuscript. Finally, we thank our colleagues and collaborators in the Department of Linguistics and the affiliated Collaborative Research Center 991 at Heinrich Heine University, and in particular the participants of the Semantics and Pragmatics Exchange (SemPrE) colloquium. This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) CRC 991, Project C09.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on terminology. We use count, mass and sometimes grammatically count/mass as grammatical categories. For example, the English noun chair is count, since it is straightforwardly felicitous in syntatctic environments diagnostic of count nouns (such as direct numerical modification). The English nouns mud and furniture are mass, since they are straightforwardly felicitous in syntatctic environments diagnostic of mass nouns (such as occurring as bare singulars in the argument position). We use the terms count denotation and mass denotation in a theory dependent way. Most semantic analyses of the count/mass distinction differentiate count nouns from mass nouns in terms of some property of their denotation, be it semantic atomicity (Rothstein 2010) or disjoint counting base set (Landman 2016). The distinction between a count denotation and a mass denotation is just whatever the relevant semantic distinction is in the theory in question.
- 2.
Typically, when the syntactic environment is ambiguous, dual life nouns can have both a count reading and a mass reading. For example, Alex’s stone is in the yard is ambiguous between the count reading in which one single stone is referred to, and a mass reading in which some portion of stone-stuff is referred to.
- 3.
The novel Hungarian data and readings thereof were elicited in correspondence with native speakers including Zsofia Gyarmathy and Károly Varasdi.
- 4.
- 5.
Farkas and de Swart (2010) also argue that plural morphology includes explicit reference to pluralities and whether singular individuals are also specifically referred to is determined by the strongest meaning hypothesis for plurals. However, we remain agnostic as to whether Hungarian plurals are inclusive or exclusive.
- 6.
This enrichment of Filip and Sutton (2017) requires that counting schemas be made polymorphic with respect to applying to sets of individuals or sets of subkinds.
- 7.
Gyarmathy, PC.
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Erbach, K., Sutton, P.R., Filip, H. (2019). Bare Nouns and the Hungarian Mass/Count Distinction. In: Silva, A., Staton, S., Sutton, P., Umbach, C. (eds) Language, Logic, and Computation. TbiLLC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11456. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59565-7_5
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