Tibor Kiss

Francis Jeffry Pelletier

Halima Husić

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this book explores the relationship between mass and count nouns in a number of syntactic environments, and across a range of languages. It both explains how languages differ in their methods for describing these two fundamental categories of reality, and shows the many ways that modern linguistics looks to describe them. It also explores how the notions of count and mass apply to 'abstract nouns', adding a new dimension to the countability discussion. With its pioneering approach to the fundamental questions surrounding mass-count distinction, this book will be essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.

The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction

Things and Stuff

With philosophical and linguistic semanticists on the one side and cognitive and developmental psychologists on the other, questions in the semantic and logical theories of generic statements that employ mass terms by looking to the cognitive abilities of speakers and of child language-learners are discussed.

Mass Terms and Generics

Kinds, Things, and Stuff

Halima Husić

With contributions from world-renowned researchers, this book delves into how to best describe the phenomena of mass-count distinction.

A generic statement is a type of generalization that is made by asserting that a "kind" has a certain property. For example we might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the "kind" marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Almost all of our common sense knowledge about the everyday world is put in terms of generic statements. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are exceptions? A mass term is one that does not "divide its reference;" the word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. In a certain vicinity, one can count and identity how many dogs there are, but it doesn't make sense to do that for water--there just is water present. The philosophical literature is rife with examples concerning how a thing can be composed of a mass, such as a statue being composed of clay. Both generic statements and mass terms have led philosophers, linguists, semanticists, and logicians to search for theories to accommodate these phenomena and relationships. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume study the nature and use of generics and mass terms. Noted researchers in the psychology of language use material from the investigation of human performance and child-language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories, and to give credence to some of their earlier postulations--for instance, concerning different types of predications that are available for true generics and for the role of object recognitions in the development of count vs. mass terms. Relevant data also is described by investigating the ways children learn these sorts of linguistic items: children can learn how to sue generic statements correctly at an early age, and children are adept at individuating objects and distinguishing them from the stuff of which they are made also at an early age.

Dov M. Gabbay

John Woods

The Handbook of the History of Logic is a multi-volume research instrument that brings to the development of logic the best in modern techniques of historical and interpretative scholarship. It is the first work in English in which the history of logic is presented so extensively. The volumes are numerous and large. Authors have been given considerable latitude to produce chapters of a length, and a level of detail, that would lay fair claim on the ambitions of the project to be a definitive research work. Authors have been carefully selected with this aim in mind. They and the Editors join in the conviction that a knowledge of the history of logic is nothing but beneficial to the subject's present-day research programmes. One of the attractions of the Handbook's several volumes is the emphasis they give to the enduring relevance of developments in logic throughout the ages, including some of the earliest manifestations of the subject. Covers in depth the notion of logical consequence Discusses the central concept in logic of modality Includes the use of diagrams in logical reasoning

Logic: A History of its Central Concepts

Greg N. Carlson

This volume recasts the influential work of Barbara H. Partee in light of new studies surrounding the semantics of quantification and reference in natural language. The papers examine cutting-edge issues in formal semantics and pragmatics. With topics ranging from the fundamental issues of compositionality and information structure to the analysis of tense and aspect, Reference and Quantification is both an excellent discussion of Partee's work and a thorough overview of developments in current semantics research.

Francis Jeffry Pelletier

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