OTHER TOPICS Representing Noun Grammar in English and Spanish Dictionaries

This paper discusses the representation of the count/mass parameter in English and Spanish dictionaries. The practice ofusing a label to classify nouns as either countable or uncountable is first discussed with reference to English learners ' dictionaries. Several sample entries are analyzed, and the widespread practice of labelling a single sense as both [countable] and [uncountable] is questioned. The countable/uncountable label developed by English lexicographers has been applied to Spanish as a way to incorporate more grammar in the dictionary. We suggest that simplifying the grammatical issue of boundedness in Spanish to a single countable/uncountable label does not yield positive results, given the morphological and syntactic complexities involved. We present data from six Spanish dictionaries to show that the main issue related to representing the count/mass parameter in Spanish is not one of including more grammatical information in the dictionary entries, but rather one of listing lexicalized count senses derived from mass nouns. 1