Countability shifts in the normative dimension
Proceedings of Sinn Und Beduetung 26 (
2022)
Copy
BIBTEX
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss what we argue is a newly observed use of nouns like woman, man, and lawyer, in the sort of morphosyntax characteristic of count nouns. We argue that the relevant data constitutes normative uses of the relevant nouns, and we build an analysis on the assumption that such nouns are polysemous between descriptive and normative senses (Leslie 2015), using the formal account of polysemy in Pustejovsky (1998), and the analysis of count- ability in Rothstein (2010). In doing so, we provide evidence in support of the aforementioned kinds of analyses of social terms and countability, as opposed to others which do not seem to be able to account for the data in as straight forward a way.