Olga Kagan (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

A fundamental issue in the semantics of nouns and nominal expressions is the origin of the mass–count distinction. The classical approach treats the mass–count contrast as a distinction on nouns, presumably present already in the lexicon. Challenging this view, a growing body of literature argues that cross-linguistically, a count interpretation can only be derived in the syntax. The present talk provides evidence in favor of the former approach. It argues that count and mass nouns exhibit linguistically different behavior at a very low structural level. For this purpose, evidence from two languages is provided: Tashkent Uzbek, an obligatory classifier language, and Russian, a language with rich derivational morphology.