Countability And Plurality

The main goal of this dissertation is to make a clear distinction between countability and plurality, which are often mixed in previous literature. The former has been studied in various approaches such as semantic, syntactic and dimensional. But none of them is free from problems. This dissertation provides a combined approach of semantics and syntax to prove that countability is essentially a semantic feature but has close relationship with syntax. In particular, we distinguish three levels of countability: the possibility of being counted, count sense/usage, and count nouns. Based on this we make a clear count/mass distinction in English nouns by proposing a definition for count nouns. We believe that countability is a feature of grammar universal but reflected in different ways in different languages. For Chinese, countability is reflected at the classifier level. The usage of count classifiers provides a way to sort out count nouns.Different from countability, plurality is a functional feature of noun phrases instead of nouns, but has a semantic basis: the second level of countability. It is projected under the Num head with two values: [+SG] and [+PL]. We propose that both English and Chinese have the number projection and both are realized on classifiers, which provide the standard for counting, by triggering a CL-to-Num movement. In English, since count nouns per se provide the standard for counting, the CL is sometimes empty when they are at the NP head. Therefore a further movement is triggered: NP-CL-Num. Anyway, both count nouns and mass nouns can go with massifiers. In both languages, the singular number is not morphologically marked. As for the plural number, English has a plural marker–s while Chinese does not. Now that the number is not always morphologically reflected, how can we decide which value a number phrase takes? We propose that a reliable criterion is the number agreement between different projections within the noun phrase. This implies that determiners, numerals and nouns have the number preference. As a matter of fact, verbs also have the number preference. That's why there is the subject-predicate agreement.Based on this unified way, we propose–men as a plural classifier and (yi) xie a quantifier under the [Spec,NumP].