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Umeå Studies in the Humanities 142Number and Countability in English Nouns
Patrik SvenssonEditors: Per Råberg |
Pris: SEK 195 + porto.
 beställ! SWEDISH SCIENCE PRESS Box 118 SE-751 04 Uppsala SWEDEN Telefon: +46 (0)18-36 55 66 Fax: +46 (0)18-36 52 77 ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7191-505-2 |
This study of nominal number and countability in English brings together the notion of embodiment and an extensive orpus study. Since lanfuage is part of our “embodied” cognitive apparatus, it follows that there will be as trong correlation between our way of perceiving and cognizing the world and linguistic categories. The fundamental assumption is that countability is neither arbitrary nor predictable, but rather motivated. The category of nouns is seen as a radical category for which concrete, singular and basic-level entities serve as prototypes. Corpus data is used to populate the radical category, and a range of motivated extensions is postulated. Three commitments serve as lodestars for this analysis: the cognitive commitment, the real data commitment and the diachronic commitment. AMong other things, these emphaisize the significance of bringing in research from other disciplines, the utilization use of authentic linguistic data in a systematic way, and the careful consideration of historical aspects of the subject-matter.
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