The Interaction of Morphosyntax and Semantics in Romance Object Mass Nouns

Object mass nouns (OMNs) such as furniture or clothing are syntactically mass nouns, however, on a semantic level, they refer to individual entities. This mismatch offers an important testing ground for the study of the mass-count distinction. So far, the focus has been on English and, among the Romance languages, on Brazilian Portuguese and French. However, there is thus far no systematic cross-linguistic comparison of Romance OMNs. The present study addresses this research gap in giving an empirically based comparison of the morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of selected French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese singular OMNs as well as roughly equivalent plural OMNs such as clothes. The interaction between their morphosyntax and semantics as well as their interaction with the degree of explicitness of the mass-count distinction in the respective language is analysed by aid of a series of systematic and comparative acceptability judgment tests. The overall picture points to a highly unstable and variable set of nouns shaped by complex interactions between the morphosyntax and semantics of the individual nouns and to some extent related to the respective language-particular grammaticalised mass-count reflexes.