We are delighted to host a talk by Suzi Lima, currently an Assistant Professor in our department visiting from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research encompasses documentation and revitalization, acquisition, semantics/pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. Her talk, "A typology of the count/mass distinction in Brazil and its relevance for count/mass theories," will be taking place on Friday, November 23 at 3:00 PM in SS 560A. A reception will follow in the department lounge.
Since Link's (1983) seminal contribution, much work has explored the semantics of count and mass nouns from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. In this talk, I explore some of the recent advances in this field, drawing particularly from experimental research and descriptions of understudied Brazilian languages, more specifically, Yudja (Juruna family, Tupi Stock). This talk has two main goals. First, I will explore the debate about what can be counted grammatically, that is, how we define atoms and what role extra-linguistic factors may play in this process, focusing on the distinction between natural and semantic atomicity (Rothstein 2010). More specifically, I will show that, in many languages, substance-denoting nouns - predicted to be uncountable in most count/mass theories (cf. Chierchia 1998, 2010) - can interact with the counting system, suggesting that the substance/object distinction might have an impact on what is more likely to be counted, but does not in itself restrict counting. I will also argue that the counting units that we use with object denoting nouns do not always correspond to 'natural atoms'. Second, I will discuss the results of a large-scale project on the count-mass distinction in 17 Brazilian languages, and how the results of this project can contribute to typological research on this topic.
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