Monday, April 15 | 9:30am-1pm | Fong Auditorium (Boylston Hall, First Floor) " " | 1-4:30pm | Boylston 303
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9:30am
Susan Rothstein: Measuring, counting and the mass count distinction
Much previous work on the mass/count distinction (Chierchia 1998,2010, Gillon 1992, Rothstein 2010, Landman 2011, Bale and Barner 2009) has focused on the properties of the denotations of mass and count nouns respectively. In this talk, I suggest addressing the issue from a different starting point, namely the contrast between measuring and counting operations. Mass nouns denote entities which can be measured, while count nouns denote entities whose atomic parts can be counted. The correct way to represent the denotation of mass and count nouns must allow for a plausible application of measure and counting operations respectively.
11:00am
Gennaro Chierchia: How universal is the mass/count distinction? Three grammars of counting
12:30pm
Lunch
2:00pm
Suzi Lima: The count/mass distinction in Yudja (Tupi): individuadion and counting
In the literature on the count-mass noun distinction, the impossibility of combining mass nouns with numerals is a grammatical property associated with mass nouns cross-linguistically (cf. Chierchia 2010). In this presentation I will discuss the count/mass distinction in Yudja
Bale and Barner (2009) argue that comparatives are the most reliable test for the mass/count distinction, and they claim that languages with the mass/count distinction behave as English. This prediction is not borne out for Bare Singular comparatives in Brazilian Portuguese. Bare singulars in comparatives behave as fake mass in English, since they allow for different scales of comparison: cardinal, volume, weight.We review the data and, relying on Rothstein (2010), propose that bare singulars are derived from root nouns which are non-individuated lattice structures, so they may be differently measured; whereas the plural noun has already a unity in it, so it can only be counted.
3:30pm
Final Remarks
Polinsky Lab Meeting
Nina Radkevich and Greg Scontras Gender Attraction in Spanish Wednesday, April 17 | 5:15-7pm | Polinsky Lab Room 420 (Conference Room)
Congratulations to Keith Plaster, who will be a lecturer in the Language and Linguistics Program at Brandeis University starting Fall, 2013.
Harvard at CLS
Cheng-Yu Edwin Tsai will be presenting his work, "On a proper treatment of interrogative scope in Chinese wh-in-situ," at the 49th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society April 18-20.
Angelika Kratzer (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Mapping Possibilities (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2012-2013 Fellows Presentation Series) Monday, April 22 | 4pm | Sheerr Room, Fay House (10 Garden Street, Cambridge MA)
Angelika Kratzer’s area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research concerns how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to assemble complex meanings systematically from small and simple pieces. Humans talk about mere possibilities: what might have been, could be, or should be. Our notions of what is possible, inevitable, likely, or desirable are fundamentally the same and highly systematic, and this is why they have attracted the attention of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers for more than 2,000 years. The talk will illustrate how the distinctively human faculty of language interacts with other knowledge resources to help us manipulate and keep track of possibilities – sometimes for serious, sometimes just for fun.
