Analysing aspects of how our brain processes language may provide, even before the language faculty is really understood, useful insights into higher order cognitive functions. We have taken initial steps in this direction, focusing on the mass-count distinction. The mass-count distinction… read more
While much work has been done on the description of the mass/count distinction in different geographical areas, Brazilian Indigenous languages are still highly underrepresented in the field. This paper presents the results of a project that involved researchers describing the mass/count… read more
Comparatives in Brazilian Portuguese show that Bale and Barner’s (2009) generalizations do not hold cross-linguistically; this leads to reconsidering the role of cardinality in mass and count syntax. The paper discusses contrasts in the use of naturally atomic, or object, mass nouns in Brazilian… read more
We argue that Hungarian has both mass and count nouns, and a plural marker which is sensitive to the distinction, as well as a system of sortal classifiers. In English, most nouns are either mass (e.g mud) or count (e.g. book), and there are only a limited number of fully flexible nouns with both… read more
This paper examines the distribution and the interpretation of Brazilian Portuguese bare singular arguments of episodic predicates, in particular as themes. We argue that these bare singulars cannot be interpreted as indefinites as suggested in Schmitt and Munn (1999) and Müller (2002). Instead we… read more
This paper shows that Modern Hebrew bare singular kind-denoting NPs, although superficially similar to kind-denoting bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese, are in fact different in terms of distribution and interpretation. While bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese are not restricted to a… read more