Activewear and other vaguery
A morphological perspective on aggregate-mass
In the literature on the mass-count distinction,
some nominals that denote groupings of objects (e.g. English
furniture) are known to display hybrid properties,
exhibiting syntactic distribution akin to prototypical non-count nominals
(substance-denoting, e.g. mud), but showing certain
semantic properties associated with plurals. This paper aims to broaden our
perspective on the properties of such nouns, focusing on their morphological
composition in three languages, English, French, and Hebrew, where nouns of this type are
frequently created through specific derivational processes. This systematic
derivation suggests that the combination of properties associated with these
nouns should not be seen as an idiosyncratic exception to the mass-count
distinction, but as a systematic category between the two.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The mass-count distinction – basic concepts
- 3.
Aggregate-mass – basic properties and distribution
- 4.Aggregate-mass nouns: Internal membership criteria
- 5.Morphological aspects
- 5.1English derivational patterns
- 5.2French derivational patterns
- 5.3Hebrew derivational patterns
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
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