Predicting object mass nouns across languages

Abstract

The hypothesis explored in this paper is that the amount of object mass nouns (e.g., furniture, jewelry) in a given language is related to the amount of morphosyntax that indicates the countability of nouns (e.g., many, much) in that language. This hypothesis, together with the analysis of Sutton & Filip (2016) best captures the occurrence of object mass nouns across languages. The analysis of Sutton & Filip (2016) accurately predicts which class of nouns will have object mass nouns across languages – collective artifacts – and the novel hypothesis provides a means of predicting the amount of object mass nouns in a given language: languages with many morphosyntactic reflexes of the mass/count distinction will likewise have many object mass nouns – e.g. English – and languages with few morphosyntactic reflexes of the mass/count distinction will likewise have few object mass nouns – e.g., Greek, Hungarian, and Japanese.