What is it about?
Speakes of different languages, in our case Greek and English, use language differently, with this fact affecting their nonlinguistic behaviour in contexts involving language use or not.
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Why is it important?
Speakers of different languages experience reality differently and this is reflected in the use of the language of their community. We found that Greek speakers pluralise not only countable nouns but also a category of nouns which is normally uncountable, namely mass nouns, in order to convey a specific construal of reality. This linguistic habit, however, was not superficial but rather affected their cognitive thinking as well, since they categorised novel substances by attending to their overall shape, as they also did for novel objects, rather than to their material composition.
Perspectives
I find this paper particularly intriguing, since it shows how the language we use is not randomly selected but reflects the way we think about objects and substances in the real world. Aristotle's matter is the founding ground for both categories of entities.
Dr Ifigeneia Athanasiadou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Plural Mass Nouns and the Construal of Individuation: Crosslinguistic Evidence from Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviour in Labelling and Non-labelling Contexts, Cognitive Semantics, February 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/23526416-00301003.
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Resources
Plural mass nouns and the construal of individuation
The use of plural mass nouns by Greek speakers and their construal of substances as individual objects
A Conceptual Metonymy Account of Count and Non-Count Nouns: A Study of Modern Greek Nouns from the Domains of Eating and Drinking
Metonymy appears to be an efficient means of communicating meaning since, especially in the domain of food and drinks, it achieves accuracy, clarity, relevance, and economy of use, at the same time.
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