Not-negation revisited: variation between a and any in verb complements in contemporary spoken American English

In not-negated English sentences with indefinite expressions following the verb, there is variation between the indefinite article and any as determiners of nouns. The standard view is that singular count nouns take the indefinite article and singular non-count and plural nouns take any. However, it is possible to encounter examples like it isn't any threat, there isn't any lock or I don't have any problem.The article studies variation between the indefinite article and any as post-verbal determiners of singular nouns in 21,084 not-negated sentences in the spoken component of The Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA SPOK. The indefinite article is dominant with 90 per cent of the tokens. Variation is extremely rare in sentences with copular be and much more frequent in sentences with existential be and have. Among the reasons for variation between verb types is the use of do-support with have (but not with be). Expressions such as have a job/car/home or there's not a/an with uncontracted not may also prevent the use of any. Variation occurs mostly with abstract nouns such as problem, choice, way, place, reason. This finding is surprising as abstract nouns have rarely been discussed in the literature on varying countability of nouns.

Number and the Mass–Count Distinction

This chapter reviews the connections between number marking (specifically, singular and plural marking) and the mass–count distinction. It explores how different semantic theories of number marking interact with various ontological theories of the mass–count distinction. It also discusses a growing tension within the mass–count literature. On one hand, there are many semantic and syntactic similarities between mass nouns and plurals, which suggests that the two subcategories might have many features in common. On the other hand, verbal, auxiliary, and determiner agreement patterns suggest that mass nouns share certain syntactic properties with singular count nouns. Yet, singular count nouns and plural count nouns hardly share any properties in common, both in terms of their syntactic distribution and their semantic implications. The chapter discusses two potential resolutions to this growing tension.

Individuation

Languages differ in how they refer to countable objects. In number-marking languages such as English, countable individuals are often labelled by count nouns (e.g. two hippos), but languages such as Japanese lack mass–count syntax and require classifiers when referring to entities (e.g. two CL hippo). These cross-linguistic differences have led some to propose that linguistic structure affects how speakers construe entities in the world. Shown an ambiguous entity, English speakers tend to construe it as an object kind, whereas Japanese speakers construe it as a substance kind. However, recent studies show that these differences are likely due to lexical statistics, with English speakers drawing on the distribution of mass– count nouns to infer that the ambiguous entity is likely an object kind. Developmental studies further show that infants can distinguish between objects and substances. Together, recent studies suggest the language we speak does not affect how we construe entities.

Common names and proper nouns: Morphosyntactic evidence of a complete nominal paradigm

The terms "common noun" and "proper name" encode two dichotomies that are often conflated. This paper explores the possibility of the other combinations—"common name" and "proper noun"—and concludes that both exist on the basis of their morphosyntactic behavior. In support of common names, inflectional regularization is determined to result from a "name" layer in the structure, meaning that common nouns that regularize are, in fact, common names (computer mouses, tailor’s gooses). In support of proper nouns, there are bare singular count nouns in English that receive definite interpretations and seem to be licensed as arguments by the same null determiner as proper names (I left town, she works at home). Not only does a four-way distinction between nouns, names, proper nouns, and proper names achieve greater empirical coverage, but it also captures the independent morphosyntactic effects of [PROPER] and [NAME] as features on D and N, respectively.

Regular and compositional aspects of NPN constructions

The article proposes a novel analysis of NPN constructions, exemplified by English expressions like back to back and year after year. An NPN is typically composed of two identical bare singular count nouns with a preposition between them. Previous research tends to treat NPNs as highly idiosyncratic. While acknowledging some idiosyncrasies, the present contribution shows that NPNs exhibit a considerable degree of regularity and compositionality. A widespread view that bare singulars normally do not function as arguments is shown to rest on weak foundations. As a consequence, the present approach is able to show that NPNs are, at the core, NPs with PP modifiers. Nominal NPNs have this basic structure, while adverbial NPNs involve an extra layer of semantics and are exocentric constructions. A distinction between nominal types and instances is employed to account for the semantics of bare singulars. NPNs exhibit two kinds of emergent meanings, leading to chain NPNs and twin NPNs. The different semantic structures of these NPN subtypes explain why some NPNs can have nominal in addition to adverbial functions. The data comes mostly from Norwegian. Details differ between languages, but central parts of the analyses can be assumed to hold for other languages as well.

Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns.

Cross-categorial gradability in Logoori

The central empirical observation of this paper is that there are polysemous lexical items in a number of unrelated languages that have similar, not intuitively related, meanings. These meanings are 'to arrive'/'to reach,' 'to be enough,' and 'must.' The central theoretical claim of this paper is based on a case study of one such polysemous lexical item in Logoori (Bantu, JE 41; Kenya). We argue that these three meanings all arise from a single semantic denotation that is sensitive to a shared gradable component in the semantics of linguistic expressions referring to spatial paths, gradable predicates, measures of plural count nouns/mass nouns, and modals. The main theoretical issue addressed in this paper is the application of ordered, abstract scales in a model of grammar. This paper is an abridged version of Bowler & Gluckman, to appear.

Atomic Structures in the Denotation Of Abstract Nouns

Countability is a universal lexical category that provides a binary division of nouns into countable and uncountable nouns or is also called count and mass nouns. Usually, count nouns refer to things or objects which can be individuated and thus counted, while mass nouns refer to substances or stuff such as water,wine, blood, or mud for which it is less easy to identify what and how to count. This cognitive division leaves abstract nouns out. Abstract nouns neither refer to things or objects nor to substances or stuff. On the contrary, the reference of abstract nouns is rather heterogeneous comprising different kinds of nouns such as processes, states, events, measure and time terms, and alike. The aim of this paper is to present the challenges abstract nouns pose for theories of countability, and to reflect on possibilities to incorporate abstract nouns in contemporary theories of countability. The research discussed in this paper circles around English abstract nouns but we will also discuss the application of certain semantic phenomena onto Bosnian nouns.