Your browser does not support the PubReader view.
Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.1137-1163
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Sep 2026
Received 05 Jul 2026 Revised 02 Aug 2026 Accepted 30 Aug 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202609.1137

Conceptual Countability beyond Furniture-type Nouns: Grammatical Visibility in English and Japanese

Daiho Kitaoka
Visiting Professor, Woosong College of Liberal Arts Woosong University W7-320, 171 Dongdaejeon-ro, Dong-gu, Daejeon, 34606, Korea, Tel: +82-42-630-9927 daihokitaoka@wsu.ac.kr


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper re-examines conceptual countability through a comparison of English and Japanese quantity interpretation. Previous analyses have focused particularly on English furniture-type nouns, which denote identifiable objects but permit comparison by either cardinality or aggregate physical properties. Preliminary Japanese observations suggest that a similar possibility may extend beyond this exceptional lexical class. In contexts that explicitly contrast number with combined thickness, volume, or weight, the Japanese nouns hon ‘book’ and sakana ‘fish’ permit aggregate interpretations while retaining stable lexical meanings and identifiable atomic individuals. A corresponding interpretation with hito ‘person’ is much less natural, suggesting that the accessibility of aggregate comparison may vary gradiently across noun classes even when conceptual countability is maintained. To account for this pattern, the paper proposes the Grammatical Visibility Hypothesis: grammatical constructions may differentially foreground conceptually available dimensions of comparison, thereby shaping their accessibility, salience, and preference without determining conceptual possibility. Because Japanese number-neutral bare nouns encode cardinality less overtly than English plural count constructions, they provide a comparative basis for reconsidering whether the apparent restriction of conceptual ambiguity to English furniture-type nouns reflects conceptual structure alone or partly the grammatical visibility of cardinality.

Keywords:

conceptual countability, ambiguity, visibility, semantics, English, Japanese

References

  • Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2000. Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198238867.001.0001]
  • Allan, K. 1977. Classifiers. Language 53(2), 285-311. [https://doi.org/10.2307/413103]
  • Bale, A. and D. Barner. 2009. The interpretation of functional heads: Using comparatives to explore the mass/count distinction. Journal of Semantics 26(3), 217-252. [https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp003]
  • Barner, D. and R. McKeown. 2005. The syntactic encoding of individuation in language and language acquisition. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 61-72.
  • Barner, D. and J. Snedeker. 2005. Quantity judgments and individuation: Evidence that mass nouns count. Cognition 97(1), 41-66. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.06.009]
  • Borer, H. 2005. In Name Only. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bosveld de Smet, L. 1997. On Mass and Plural Quantification: The Case of French des/du NP. Doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
  • Bunt, H. C. 1985. Mass Terms and Model-Theoretic Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cheung, P., P. Li and D. Barner. 2012. What counts in Mandarin Chinese: A study of individuation and quantification. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles and R. P. Cooper, eds., Building Bridges across Cognitive Sciences around the World: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 210-215.
  • Chierchia, G. 1998a. Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of ‘semantic parameter’. In S. Rothstein, ed., Events and Grammar, 53-103. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_4]
  • Chierchia, G. 1998b. Reference to kinds across languages. Natural Language Semantics 6(4), 339-405. [https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008324218506]
  • Chierchia, G. 2010. Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation. Synthese 174(1), 99-149. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9686-6]
  • Chierchia, G. 2021. Mass vs. count: Where do we stand? Outline of a theory of semantic variation. In T. Kiss, F. J. Pelletier and H. Husić, eds., Things and Stuff: The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, 21-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108937979.003]
  • Corbett, G. G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • de Oliveira, R. P. and S. Rothstein. 2011. Bare singular noun phrases are mass in Brazilian Portuguese. Lingua 121(15), 2153-2175. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2011.09.004]
  • de Vries, H. and G. Tsoulas. 2021. Overlap and countability in exoskeletal syntax: A best-of-both-worlds approach to the count-mass distinction. In T. Kiss, F. J. Pelletier and H. Husić, eds., Things and Stuff: The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, 305-318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108937979.014]
  • Deprez, V. 2005. Morphological number, semantic number and bare nouns. Lingua 115(6), 857-883. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2004.01.006]
  • Doetjes, J. S. 1997. Quantifiers and Selection: On the Distribution of Quantifying Expressions in French, Dutch and English. Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
  • Erbach, K., P. R. Sutton, H. Filip and K. Byrdeck. 2021. Object mass nouns as an arbiter for the count-mass category. In T. Kiss, F. J. Pelletier and H. Husić, eds., Things and Stuff: The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, 167-192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108937979.008]
  • Gillon, C. 2015. Innu-Aimun plurality. Lingua 162, 128-148. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.05.006]
  • Goldberg, A. E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Goldberg, A. E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001]
  • Greenberg, J. H. 1972. Numeral classifiers and substantival number: Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type. Working Papers in Language Universals 9, 2-39.
  • Grimm, S. and B. Levin. 2012. Who has more furniture? An exploration of the basis for comparison. Paper presented at the Symposium on Mass/Count in Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Available at https://web.stanford.edu/~bclevin/paris12mcslides.pdf, .
  • Inagaki, S. and D. Barner. 2009. Countability in the absence of count syntax: Evidence from Japanese quantity judgments. In S. Inagaki, M. Hiraiwa, S. Arita, Y. Hirakawa, H. Morikawa, M. Nakayama, H. Shirai and J. Tsubakita, eds., Studies in Language Sciences 8: Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences, 111-126. Tokyo: Kuroshio Publishers.
  • Joosten, F. 2003. Accounts of the count-mass distinction: A critical survey. Nordlyd 31(1), 216-229. [https://doi.org/10.7557/12.26]
  • Kitaoka, D. 2024. The Mass-Count Distinction and the Syntax of Classifiers in Japanese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
  • Kitaoka, D. 2025. Two levels of the mass-count distinctions and noun classifications in English and Japanese. Philology Matters 52(1), 23-34.
  • Kitaoka, D. forthcoming. A descriptive typology of noun categorization in Japanese: Classifiers, animacy, and conceptual countability. Journal of the Japanese Language Association of Korea 89.
  • Kuo, G. C.-H. and K. M. Yu. 2012. Taiwan Mandarin quantifiers. In E. L. Keenan and D. Paperno, eds., Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language, 647-697. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_12]
  • Landman, F. 2011. Count nouns-mass nouns, neat nouns-mess nouns. Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6, 1-67. [https://doi.org/10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1579]
  • Langacker, R. W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Langacker, R. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume II: Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Langacker, R. W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331967.001.0001]
  • Li, X. 2013. Numeral Classifiers in Chinese: The Syntax-Semantics Interface. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. [https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110289336]
  • Paul, M., A. Zribi-Hertz and H. Glaude. 2021. Countability and number without number inflection: Evidence from Haitian Creole. In P. C. Hofherr and J. Doetjes, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number, 558-582. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795858.013.27]
  • Pelletier, F. J. 1975. Non-singular reference: Some preliminaries. In F. J. Pelletier, ed., Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems, 1-14. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4110-5_1]
  • Pelletier, F. J. 2012. Lexical nouns are both +MASS and +COUNT, but they are neither +MASS nor +COUNT. In D. Massam, ed., Count and Mass across Languages, 9-26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654277.003.0002]
  • Rothstein, S. 2010. Counting and the mass/count distinction. Journal of Semantics 27(3), 343-397. [https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffq007]
  • Rothstein, S. 2016. Object mass nouns from a crosslinguistic perspective. Paper presented at the Workshop on Syntax and Semantics of the Nominal Domain.
  • Sudo, Y. 2016a. Countable nouns in Japanese. In G. Tsoulas, ed., Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, 169-179. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Sudo, Y. 2016b. The semantic role of classifiers in Japanese. Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 11, 1-15. [https://doi.org/10.4148/1944-3676.1108]
  • Wiltschko, M. 2012. Decomposing the mass/count distinction: Evidence from languages that lack it. In D. Massam, ed., Count and Mass across Languages, 146-171. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654277.003.0009]
  • Wisniewski, E. J. 2010. On using count nouns, mass nouns, and pluralia tantum: What counts? In F. J. Pelletier, ed., Kinds, Things, and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics, 160-190. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195382891.003.0009]
  • Zhang, A. 2018. On Non-Culminating Accomplishments in Mandarin. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
  • Zwicky, A. M. and J. M. Sadock. 1975. Ambiguity tests and how to fail them. In J. P. Kimball, ed., Syntax and Semantics 4, 1-36. New York: Academic Press. [https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368828_002]