Disambiguating quantity judgements: mass/count and extra-grammatical cues
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5811Keywords:
comparatives, mass nouns, count nouns, disambiguation, grinding, packagingAbstract
Comparative quantity judgements are a useful probe into the semantics of the mass/count distinction, where count nouns usually trigger cardinal comparisons (more dogs), and mass nouns trigger non-cardinal measurement (more rice). However, exceptions like ‘object’ mass nouns (furniture) and ‘mixed’ comparatives (more gold than diamonds) complicate this pattern. In such cases there is often a mismatch between the mass/count status of the noun and the criterion for comparison, which challenges our understanding of the mass/count distinction and how it affects quantity judgements. We propose that these mismatches reflect a systematic ambiguity, where the mass/count distinction is one of the factors influencing disambiguation. Using a new experimental method focused on ambiguity judgements instead of truth-value judgements, the results support the traditional semantic encoding of the mass/count distinction, with operations of ‘packaging’ and ‘grinding’ triggered by extra-grammatical factors.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Sven Smeman, Maaike Smit, James A. Hampton, Yoad Winter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.