On the (Changing?) Status of the Mass/Count Distinction in Hebrew: Evidence from Acquisition

1.1 The mass/count distinction in adult language In a great number of languages around the world, nouns may be categorized as either mass or count. Being one or the other, they show different syntactic and semantic properties crosslinguistically. Following Chierchia (1998), it is assumed that Hebrew (and English) mass nouns have the syntactic properties listed in (1): (1) (i) no plural morphology (ii) no numerals (iii) need classifier/measure phrases to be quantized The first property, namely, that mass nouns cannot be pluralized, is illustrated in (2). For comparison, I also provide examples with count nouns, which can be pluralized. (2) a. *bigudim zolim yoter bakaic. clothing-plm cheap-plm more in-the-summer *'Clothings are cheaper in the summer.' b. bgadim zolim yoter bakaic. clothes-plm cheap-plm more in-the-summer 'Clothes are cheaper in the summer.' The second property, namely, that mass nouns cannot be counted directly (as opposed to count nouns) is exemplified in (3)