Ling Lunch talk

Time:

Panpan Yao

Queen Mary, University of London

How syntactic cues affect Mandarin speakers’ anticipation of mass/count nouns

Abstract:

It is a common awareness that there exist two kinds of objects in the natural world, one is objects which have discrete and individual units by nature, and the other one is substances and materials which are always independent of a particular shape or size. It is interesting to investigate how this cognitive mass/count distinction mapped into varied languages across the world.