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 mass and count forms (e.g. stone/stones). In Hungarian, however, most count nouns are flexible, and a noun like rózsa ‘rose’ is ambiguous between a mass and a count item. This results in two ways of counting: rózsa as a count noun can be directly modified by a numeral as in két rózsa ‘two roses’, but if it is a mass noun counting uses a classifier construction as in két szál rózsa.
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2005Stucturing Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Chierchia, Gennaro
1998Reference to kinds. Natural Language Semantics 6. 339–405.
Chierchia, Gennaro
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Csirmaz, Anikó & Éva Dékány
2014Hungarian is a classifier language. In Simone Raffaele & Francesca Masini (eds.), Word Classes: Nature, Typology and Representations, 141–160. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dékány, Éva
2011A profile of the Hungarian DP. Tromsø: University of Tromsø dissertation.
Farkas, Donka & Henriette De Swart
2003The Semantics of Incorporation. Stanford Monographs in Linguistics. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Landman, Fred & Susan Rothstein
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Landman, Fred & Susan Rothstein
2011The felicity of aspectual for-phrases, part 1: homogeneity in the semantics of aspectual for-phrases. Language and Linguistics Compass 6.2, 85–96. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley.
Li, XuPing
2013Numeral Classifiers in Chinese: The Syntax/Semantics Interface. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Pelletier, Francis Jeffry
2012Lexical Nouns are both +MASS and +COUNT but they are neither +MASS nor +COUNT. In Diane Massam (ed.), Count and Mass Across Languages, 9–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pires de Oliveira, Roberta & Susan Rothstein
2011Bare singular noun phrases are mass in Brazilian Portuguese. Lingua 121. 2153–2175.
Rothstein, Susan
2010Counting, measuring and the mass-count distiction. The Journal of Semantics 27:3. 343–397.
Rothstein, Susan
(2017) Semantics for Counting and Measuring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rothstein, Susan
to appear). Count vs. Mass. In Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann & Thomas Ede Zimmermann eds. The Blackwell Companion to Semantics (SemCom) Oxford Wiley Blackwell
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1999Against the nominal mapping parameter: Bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese. In Nancy Hall, Masako Hirotani & Pius Tamanji Mako (eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 29), 339–354. Delaware: University of Delaware.
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2014The Semantics of Measurement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University dissertation.
Trugman, Helen
2013Naturally-atomic singular NA kinds in Russian as lexically derived. In Uwe Junghanns, Dorothee Fehrmann, Denisa Lenertová & Hagen Pitsch (eds.), Formal Description of Slavic Languages 9, 325–348. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
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[no author supplied]
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