{"product_id":"objects-and-the-grammar-of-peter-r-sutton-9780192891143","title":"Objects and the Grammar of Countability","description":"This book proposes an object-centred and contextualist account of the count\/mass distinction. The main empirical finding is that there is a connection between variation in count\/mass lexicalization patterns across and within languages and the ways in which mass or count nouns can diverge from manifesting the canonical grammatical reflexes expected of the count\/mass distinction in a given language. Assuming compositional semantics enriched with Classical Extensional Mereology, Peter Sutton and Hana Filip propose that mass-count pairs of nouns (across and within languages) lexicalize the same number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects, which comprises not only one discrete entity separate from other entities, but also a discrete entity based on its affordances and topological properties. For a concrete common noun to be grammatically count, as needed in counting and quantificational constructions, it must specify a quantized set of objects relative to a context of individuation. Context plays a crucial role, since it can afford different ways of viewing the entities in a noun's extension, and so what counts as 'one' for that noun in that context. The book outlines a system of three perceptual-interactive constraints, based upon how we perceive and interact with objects, that predicts the propensity for a number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects to nonetheless be lexicalized as mass. These constraints are also key to explaining variation in the count\/mass lexicalization patterns of such properties. The authors also show that the extent to which a core property can satisfy these constraints can be estimated from a corpus, and how these corpus measures can be used to model variation in count\/mass lexicalization patterns. The main data relies on concrete common nouns in number-marking languages, namely Czech, English, Finnish, and German, but the account is also extended to abstract nouns, and to two non-number-marking languages, namely Mandarin and Yudja.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Peter R. Sutton,Hana Filip\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0192891146\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780192891143\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 11\/27\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 288\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"Peter R. Sutton","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48437670674687,"sku":"9780192891143","price":135.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_27d68ef3-b42c-42fe-a565-296758e423cb.jpg?v=1777163303","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/objects-and-the-grammar-of-peter-r-sutton-9780192891143","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}