[Review of the book Words Without Objects: Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity, by Haycock]

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Koslicki, Kathrin

• Introduction: Many languages mark a distinction which is commonly referred to as the “mass/count- distinction”; e.g., the distinction between the two occurrences of ‘hair’ in ‘There is hairin my soup’ and ‘There is a hair in my soup’. Often, the mass/count-distinction is drawn primarily with respect to nouns and noun-phrases (or particular occurrences thereof); and it is drawn (at least in English) using syntactic criteria such as the presence or absence of plural-morphology and the licensing of particular kinds of determiners and quantifiers (‘much’ versus ‘many’, etc.). Such purely syntactic criteria lead to the following sort of classification: Mass-Nouns: ‘air’, ‘snow’, ‘clothing’, ‘knowledge’, ... Count-Nouns: ‘beach’, ‘sheep’, ‘clothes’, ‘belief’, ... Dual-Use Nouns: ‘hair’, ‘cloth’, ‘pain’, ‘justification’, ... Even more so than the question of how exactly the mass/count-distinction is to be drawn, linguists and philosophers have been exercised by the question of how this distinction should be interpreted semantically and whether it has any ontological implications.

• Date created

  2007

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Quantity
  • Philosophy
  • Metaphysics
  • Mass/Count-Distinction

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3QV3CJ4S

• License

  © 2007 K. Koslicki et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.