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<Paper uid="W96-0307">
  <Title>i THE LEXICAL SEMANTICS OF ENGLISH COUNT AND MASS NOUNS</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="58" end_page="59" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Above, I presented a semantic, syntactic, and morphological account of the mass count distinction and I have shown how that account can be extended to accommodate the fact that mass nouns can be converted into count nounS and count nouns into mass nouns, with concomitant shifts in the meanings of the nouns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The account presented postulates the pair of morphological features ~CT, which are assumed to be assigned uniquely to the lexical entries for English common nouns. At the same time, however, I have postulated lexical rules whereby mass nouns are converted to count nouns and count nouns are converted to mass nouns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The question arises: are lexical rules for the conversion of mass nouns to count nouns and count nouns to mass nouns, on the one hand, and the assignment of the features =t=CT, on the other, redundant with respect to one another? The answer, I believe, is no. And the reason for this answer can be seen by considering the need for this redundancy in the case of conversion of proper names to common nouns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> It is well-known that proper names can undergo lexical conversion to become common nouns. For example, proper names for companies become common nouns denoting their products.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (22.1) Reed bought every Compaq in the store.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (22.2) Some BMW was involved in the traffic accident.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Family names become common nouns denoting those in the family of that name.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (23.1) Each Jenner at the wedding had a sarcastic remark to make.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> (23.2) No Romanow ever turns down a free ticket.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Personal names Can be converted into common nouns with the concomitant shift in meaning to denote the set of people who have the proper names in question as a proper name. Thus, Tom, as a common noun, denotes the set of people who have Tom as a proper name.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> (24.1) The Fred I am speaking of is different from the Fred you were speaking of.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> (24.2) How many Mary's are there in this room? And finally, complete personal names of people well-known to the speakers become common nouns denoting those people sharing contextually salient properties with the person denoted by the personal name (Clark and Gerrig 1983).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> (25.1) Eric is a veritable Napoleon.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> (25.2) George did a Willie Nelson.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> Proper names are constantly being added to English; and once added, they are subject to such conversions. These conversions are clearly productive, a fact borne out for the last type given by the experiments of Clark and Gerrig (1983). At the same time, it is equally clear that productive conversions of this sort can give rise to lexicalizations (Bauer 1983: ch. 3.2.3). Here, I have in mind such common nouns as kleenex, band-aid, hoover, and xerox, which clearly derive from proper names. Such lexicalizations require lexical entries of their own. Thus, it is clear that, to accommodate the nonce usage of proper names as common nouns, conversion rules, with concomitant semantics, are required, and that to accommodate the fact that some proper names become lexicalized as common nouns, requires that they be given special lexical entries.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> sit must be stressed here that the notion of part here is not the mereological notion of part, which is a transitive, asymmetric relation, but the natltral language notion of part, which is not, in general, transitive. See Cruse (1986: eh. 7.1) for discussion.  The situation is not dissimilar for the division within common nouns between mass nouns and count nouns: on the one hand, nonce formations which give rise to the conversion from mass to count or count to mass requires that these conversion rules have a concomitant semantics; on the other hand, the very notion of conversion does not stand without an initial specification of membership in one lexical class or the other.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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