The above examples show what in the literature is commonly called ‘type-shifting’, a mass noun becomes a count noun by adding a plural marker with subsequent change of meaning16. Example (9) then is understood as either three bottles/glasses of wine or as three different kinds of wine. The same applies to Standard Scandinavian mass nouns, as illustrated in (10).
(9) three wines (10) a. tre mjölk / öl
b. *tre mjölk-PL / öl-PL 'three milk / beer'
c. fyra limonad
'four (glasses of) lemonade' d. fyra limonad-er17
four lemonade-PL
'four (types) of lemonade' Swedish, Holmes & Hinchliffe (2003)
16 Although I assume that there is no type-shifting in the classificational sense mentioned above, i.e.
nouns belonging to the class of mass nouns shift to the class of count nouns, I will use the term to indicate the differernt readings of nouns, i.e. the shift from mass reading to count reading and vice verca.
17 The fact that some quantified mass nouns can take plural inflection whereas others cannot may be due to phonological reasons. The noun limonad 'lemonade' as a polysyllabic noun ending in a stressed syllable can clearly be allocated in the third declension, which uses –er to form the plural, whereas mjölk and öl, monosyllables ending in consonants, could belong to several declension classes (one of which is even the sixth declension, the zero plural).
Although all of the nouns in (10) are mass nouns, they are understood as being quantified. Some of these nouns can even take a plural article (10d). Example (10a) is ambiguous and can be understood as three glasses/packages or three brands of beer/milk (cf. (9)), whereas (10c) and (10d) are unambiguous: the first clearly denotes four glasses of lemonade; the latter, four different types (brands) of lemonade. That is, the plural article in (10d) adds a kind-/type reading.
However, type-shifting does not occur in every language. In Greek, for example, plural mass nouns maintain their semantics and type-shifting does not occur.
(11) epesan nera sto kefali mu fell-3PL water-PL onto head mine
‘Water fell on my head’ (Alexiadou 2009a:3) In other languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, there is no mass-count distinction at all, hence bare nouns can be interpreted as singular or as plural.
(12) a. Gakusei-ga ki-ta.
student-NOM come-PAST
‘A student / Students / The student(s) came.’
Nakanishi & Ritter (2009) Chierchia (1998) argues that in these languages all nouns are mass nouns and thus these languages lack obligatory plural marking. Since there is no plural marking, they require classifiers for counting. This predicts that plural marking and classifiers cannot co-occur. Data suggests, however, that this is not true, and thus this poses a problem for Chierchia’s proposal. Classifier languages may have optional plural marking, such as the Japanese plural marker –tati (13), which can be attached to human count nouns and to proper names.
(13) Gakkusei-tati-ga sono biru-o torikakonda.
student-TATI-NOM that building-ACC surrounded
‘(The) students surrounded that building.’ (Nakanishi & Ritter 2009)
What is more, plural marking can co-occur with classifiers. In (14), a common noun combines with a classifier, with plural marking – and even with a numeral. If all nouns in classifier languages are mass nouns, as Chierchia (1998) argues – or in all languages as Borer (2005) assumes (see below) –, the question arises why Japanese nouns can then easily combine not only with classifiers but with numerals, too. A consensus in the literature is that mass nouns do not occur with numerals.
(14) 200-nin-izyoo-no gakkusei-tati 200-CL-or more-GEN student-TATI
‘200 or more students’ (Nakanishi & Tomioka 2004:120) Mass and count nouns are also said to be incompatible with respect to the determiners they combine with. Determiners such as few are taken to be only compatible with count nouns. Here Japanese again provides a counter-example, thus suggesting that either the distinction mass-count or the assumption that in classifier languages all nouns are mass is on the wrong track – or perhaps both suppositions are invalid.
(15) ??Kooen-de utat-tei-ta onnanoko-no nakani-wa park-at sing-PROG-PAST girl-GEN among-TOP
otokonoko-mo ni,san-nin mazatteita boy-also a few-CL were included
‘Among (the) girls who were singing in the park, a few boys were included’18 Nakanishi & Tomioka (2004:128)
18 (15) is marked with a question mark not because of a syntactic markedness but because of a semantic mismatch: it seems odd to include boys in among (the) girls.
Indirect support for the ‘non-classification’ of nouns and thus support for the belief that lexical items cannot be categorized comes from a semantic perspective of the mass/count distinction.
It is true that mass and count nouns denote different things. Count nouns denote individuated items, and mass nouns denote unspecified sets – but this does not necessarily imply that they belong to different classes. Not only does the syntactic behaviour of count and mass nouns overlap but their semantic properties do as well, so that the denotation of bare plurals and mass nouns could be considered the same. Nakanishi (2007) calls this 'cumulative reference'.
This reasoning, however, is too simple in that it implies that bare plurals and mass nouns are in principle the same. We have seen above that the syntactic behaviour and semantic denotation is similar, if not the same. Again, though, this seems to be language specific, if this simplification is true at all. Japanese, for example, not only lacks the traditional mass-count distinction, it is also exceptional in another way: Japanese does not have a systematic marking of (in)definiteness.
Thus (12) remains ambiguous with respect to definiteness: without overtly marked definiteness, N+tati looks like a bare plural. However, as Nakanishi & Tomioka (2004) show, –tati-nominals are in fact quite different from bare plurals in that they seem to encode, among other differences, certain aspects of definiteness (cf. also Chinese –men, which behaves similar to –tati).
Borer (2005) argues that the fact that all nouns are mass is not unique to classifier languages but that this holds cross-linguistically.
“All nouns, in all languages, are mass, and are in need of being portioned out, in some sense, before they can interact with the ‘count’
system. This portioning-out function, accomplished in languages like Chinese through the projection of classifiers, is accomplished in languages like English by the plural inflection, as well as by the indefinite article. Put differently, plural inflection is classifier inflection, thus accounting for the complementary distribution between classifier inflection and plural inflection, now reduced to the fact that they are simply distinct instantiations of the classifier system.” (Borer 2005:93)
This seems once again to postulate a classification, namely that all nouns in all languages are mass. However, what Borer (2005) actually means is that the default interpretation is mass and that both number specification and classifiers
belong to the same functional category (cf. complementary distribution in the quote above). However, as mentioned above, optional plural marking co-occurs with classifiers, at least in Japanese. Borer’s statement thus does not hold across languages. Grammatical representation of plurality varies from language to language, hence number specification and classifiers do not belong to the same functional category .19
Borer’s structure includes a classifier phrase, CLmax, which has a dividing function. The absence of CLmax results in mass interpretation. The existence of CLmax is a precondition for a quantity phrase, #P, but the counting function of #P is not a precondition for the dividing function of CLmax. In other words, nouns can be divided but not counted, and whether the interpretation of N is mass or count is a property of the DP and not of N.
The issue of the count-mass distinction, or, more precisely, the question whether this distinction exists at all at an inherent lexical level, raises even more doubts in language families such as Salish20. Halkomelem Salish does not show any of the differences commonly anticipated with the mass-count distinction (Wiltschko 2009). Wiltschko deduces therefore that “the count/mass distinction is not grammaticized in Halkomelem whereas it is in English” (Wiltschko 2009:4). This result is understandable only under a theory that does not question the classification of nouns. But if we do question the classification of nouns, the behaviour of the Halkomelem nominal system provides additional support for the assumption that there is no such distinction in the first place.
(16) a. tsel kw’éts-lexw te swóweles 1sg.s see-trans det boy.pl
‘I have seen boys.’
b. tsel kw’éts-lexw te syiqyíq
1sg.s see-trans det snow.pl
’I have seen [a lot of] snow.’
19 Nakanishi & Ritter (2009) derive –tati-structures by adding a further functional projection to the structure.
c. tsel kw’éts-lexw qex (te) syíts’em21 1sg.s see-trans Q det sand.pl
‘I saw lots of sand.’
d. tsel kw’éts-lexw te qex syíts’em 1sg.s see-trans det Q sand.pl
‘I saw lots of sand’ (Wiltschko 2009)
If plural marking does not distinguish between count and mass nouns, we can deduce that the distinction mass-count is not a lexeme-inherent one. An unanswered question though is whether Halkomelem shows syntactic differences between mass and count. I assume it does not. There does not seem to be the need to individuate nouns, hence Halkomelem probably does not make use of a classifier phrase.
Approaches that assume that countability is expressed either via a classifier system or via plural marking (e.g., Chierchia 1998, Borer 2005) imply that plural marker and classifier occupy the same head of a functional projection (probably NumP, or CLP), and thus the count/mass distinction can syntactically be derived by the presence or absence of that functional projection. As we have seen in the preceding section, there is not only an overlap between the notions of count and mass nouns, but also there are languages in which the complementary distribution of classifier and plural marking does not hold.