Abstract
This paper contributes to our understanding of countability in two ways. First, I derive the various mass and count readings from the interaction between two syntactic features, viz. [Div] (which creates countable items, cf. Borer 2005) and [Size] (which creates units). Second, I show how crosslinguistic variation in the expression of countability can be reduced to whether [Div] and [Size] each head their own projection or are combined on a single syntactic head (cf. Thráinsson 1996; Bobaljik and Thráinsson, Syntax, 1: 37-71, 1998). Finally, I discuss the various Germanic morphemes that can realize the [Size] feature.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Hagit Borer, Norbert Corver, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Jenny Doetjes, Henk van Riemsdijk and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd for valuable comments and discussion.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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De Belder, M. A morphosyntactic decomposition of countability in Germanic. J Comp German Linguistics 14, 173–202 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-011-9045-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-011-9045-0