LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Count Noun, Teddy Bear, Mass Noun
Document Summary
Knowledge of meaning as knowledge of reference and truth conditions. Speakers of english can distinguish between an in nite number of grammatical sentences and of ungrammatical sentences. Cannot have memorized truth conditions or all the sentences that are grammatical. syntactic tree give us an easy way to de ne semantic rules. Count nouns are nouns like book or chair. They are those terms that are compatible with numeral determiners such as two", three". They cannot appear in the singular without a determiner. They may appear in the singular preceded by a" or every". By contrast, mass terms are those that are incompatible with numeral determiners such as. They have the opposite properties from count nouns: They can appear in the singular without a determiner. They cannot appear in the singular preceded by a" or every". They cannot appear in the plural ex: water, rice, hair, wine.
