Morphosyntax and semantic type of noun phrases in Turkish

Morphosyntax and semantic type of noun phrases in TurkishChierchia (1998) proposed that the semantic type of nouns varies across languages: in some languages, nouns denote entities; in others, nouns denote predicates; in yet others, nouns of both types are attested. Chierchia posits the existence of two parameters to account for this divisionnamely [arg], which determines whether a language contains nouns denoting arguments, and [pred], which determines whether a language contains nouns denoting predicates.

Chierchia (1998) proposed that the semantic type of nouns varies across languages: in some languages, nouns denote entities; in others, nouns denote predicates; in yet others, nouns of both types are attested. Chierchia posits the existence of two parameters to account for this divisionÑnamely [±arg], which determines whether a language contains nouns denoting arguments, and [±pred], which determines whether a language contains nouns denoting predicates. Chierchia then makes generalizations about each group.

This paper examines the noun phrase semantics of Turkish. My analysis shows that not all [+arg, _pred] languages have nouns that act alike: while Turkish patterns in key ways with Chinese, a [+arg, _pred] language, it does not follow all of ChierchiaÕs predictions for [+arg, _pred] languages. In particular, it appears that some Turkish nouns, while being ÒmassÓ in the sense that they denote kinds, are countable.