Count and Mass Across Languages

Diane Massam is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto where she served as Chair of Linguistics from 2002 to 2008. Her research focus is on syntactic theory, in the areas of argument structure, case, predication, and word order, working mainly on Niuean, a Polynesian language. She is the co-editor of Ergativity: Emerging issues (Springer 2006) and has published papers in many journals such as Lingua, Oceanic Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, English Language and Linguistics, and Syntax. She has held several research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was co-editor of Squibs for Linguistic Inquiry (1998-2002), honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland (2001), visiting professor at Harvard University (2006), and an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2010).

1. The Count Mass Distinction: Issues and Perspectives ; 2. Lexical Nouns are Both +MASS and +COUNT, but They are Neither +MASS nor +COUNT ; 3. Aspects of Individuation ; 4. Collectives in the Intersection of Mass and Count Nouns: A Cross-Linguistic Account ; 5. Individuation and Inverse Number Marking in Dagaare ; 6. General Number and the Structure of DP ; 7. Plural Marking Beyond Count Nouns ; 8. Aspectual Effects of a Pluractional Suffix: Evidence From Lithuanian ; 9. Decomposing the Mass/count Distinction: Evidence from Languages that Lack it ; 10. On the Mass/count Distinction in Ojibwe ; 11. Counting and Classifiers ; 12. Countability and Numeral Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese ; 13. Semantic Triggers, Linguistic Variation, and the Mass-Count Distinction ; 14. Classifying and Massifying Incrementally in Chinese Language Comprehension ; References ; Index