Key words:

count, mass, non-count noun, bounded, internal structure, individual, aggregate, group, substance, linguistic relativity, cultural relativity

Overview

If you tell people that you study lexical semantics or “the meaning of words,” they are likely to assume that you spend your time thinking about things like “What does love mean?” or “What is a table, really?” While some lexical semanticists do think about questions like this, much lexical semantic work on nouns is instead focused on larger categories of nouns with particular morphosyntactic properties and patterns of polysemy. After discussing the types of issues that such nouns raise in the next section, this chapter looks at why it is that some nouns are countable and others are not. That is, some nouns, like cucumber or bungalow, can be preceded by numerals and made plural (104 cucumbers, three bungalows), and others are mass nouns and not usually made plural – for example fog (#three fogs) and wheat (#twenty-seven wheats). After discussing the issue of countability in general, we look at the Conceptual Semantics componential treatment of some countability categories and the polysemy of nouns in relation to those categories, then Chierchia's proposal that mass nouns are inherently plural. Lastly, we look at how languages may differ in their treatment of nouns for particular things and ask whether these differences are arbitrary or culturally predictable, with particular attention to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.