On mass, collectives and pseudopartitives

UnrestrictedThe dissertation examines a form of construction known as pseudopartitives, focusing in particular its phrase-internal and sentential semantics. Some of the issues investigated include the relation between the lexemes within the pseudopartitive construction, the logical extension of the referred entities and the nature of the relation that obtains between them. As these issues touch upon the interaction of different types of nouns, pseudopartitives provide a good opportunity to revisit previous assumptions and claims about mass, plurals and collectives.; Chapter One provides a general outline of the dissertation and states the objectives pursued. In Chapter Two, the phrasal semantics of two kinds of pseudopartitives -- collective phrase pseudopartitives (CPP) and measure phrase pseudopartitives (MPP) -- are taken as the starting point. It is proposed, following Higginbotham (1994), that the structures appropriate for the interpretation of mass nouns are Boolean algebras, which assumes no notion of atomicity. This is the central notion in the analysis of mass terms proposed in this thesis and one that distinguishes from previous analyses of mass terms, such as the Plurality View (cf. Chierchia 1996) and the Quantity View (cf. Cartwright 1975). Chapter Three is devoted to a group of syntactically noncountable nouns ('furniture', 'cutlery') whose ontological status appears to vastly differ from the prototypical cases. As the thesis illustrates, the salient contrast seen in the collective phrase pseudopartitive data highlights the extensional variation within the category of mass as being crucial in understanding the proper use and construction of CPPs. Chapter Four suggests that pragmatic principles may be at work for the pseudopartitive examples that otherwise would be judged ill-formed under the present proposal. Chapter Five and Six providefurther crosslinguistic evidence for the proposals made in this thesis. Specifically, Chapter Five argues that, in light of Marsican language, a plurality view of mass cannot be maintained. In Chapter Six, a comparative study of pseudopartitives that involves a language with a predominant classifier system -- Mandarin Chinese -- is provided, along with an argument against the view that all nouns are by default mass