Goddard, Cliff (2010). A piece of cheese, a grain of sand: The semantics of mass nouns and unitizers. In Francis Jeffry Pelletier (Ed.), Kinds, things and stuff: Mass terms and generics (pp. 132-165). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195382891.003.0008
This chapter follows up earlier work of Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka in which they argued that there are numerous, subtly different, subclasses of mass nouns. These different subclasses presuppose, they claimed, different “conceptualizations” of the nature of a mass. The present chapter concentrates on concrete mass nouns in English, arguing that the formal linguistic properties of mass nouns are systematically correlated with their conceptual content and that this conceptual content can be clearly identified using the tools of Wierzbicka and Goddard’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage system. Some of the cognitive issues raised here involve the extent that there is unity to the notion of mass‐stuff and whether there is any necessary similarity in the relevant part of the mental lives of speakers of different languages, since clearly, languages differ in the types of words that they each treat as mass.
