Kurt Erbach

SFB 991 / CRC 991

Email: Kurt.Erbach@uni-duesseldorf.de
Website: https://kerbach2.github.io/

Subject

Linguistics

SToRE Membership

SToRE member 10.02.2016-24.06.2019

1. advisor: Hana Filip
2. advisor: Peter Sutton
3. advisor: Timm Lichte

PhD Project

“Object Mass Nouns: A Frame Based Analysis.” In my thesis, I motivate the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the number of object mass nouns in a language and the number of morphosyntactic environments sensitive to the countability of nouns in that language. Object mass nouns constitute a means to test theories of the mass/count distinction because they denote discrete objects but grammatically pattern with substance denoting nouns, therefore exhibiting misalignment of conceptual individuation and grammatically mass behavior (Chierchia 2010). Theories of the mass/count distinction typically focus on English, include data from a classifier language like Mandarin, and sometimes address one or two other languages as well (Chierchia 2015, Landman 2016, Rothstein 2017, Sutton & Filip 2017). Following crosslinguistic approach of Grimm (2012), my thesis investigates typologically distinct languages—Greek, Hungarian, and Japanese—for object mass nouns as a means of testing the adequacy of the leading theories of the mass/count distinction. This investigation reveals that a disjointness-based approach to the mass/count distinction (Landman 2011, 2016; Sutton & Filip 2016, 2017) allows for the most accurate crosslinguistic predictions. Furthermore, the respective numbers of object mass nouns and morphosyntactic environments sensitive to the countability of nouns in Greek, Hungarian, and Japanese are relatively low when compared to those for English, and this comparison supports the hypothesis that there is a relationship between he number of object mass nouns in a language and the number of morphosyntactic environments sensitive to the countability of nouns in that language.

Publications

Erbach, K. 2019. A unified analysis of plural nouns in Greek. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23. Forthcoming.

Erbach, K. and L. Berio. 2019. Readings of Plurals and Common Ground. In E. Pacuit and J. Sikos (eds). Special Volume of Lecture notes in Computer Science. Springer. Forthcoming

Erbach, K., H. Filip, and P. Sutton. 2019.  Bare nouns and the Hungarian mass/count distinction. In: C. Umbach, P. Sutton (eds.), Language, Logic and Computation. 12th TbiLLC Symposium, Lecture notes in Computer Science. Forthcoming.

Erbach, K., P. Sutton, H. Filip, and K. Byrdeck. (2019). Object Mass Nouns as Arbiter for the Mass/Count Category. In T. Kiss, H. Husic, and F. Pelletier (eds.), The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

Erbach, K. 2018. Fighting for a share of the covers: Accounting for inaccessible readings of plural predicates. Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2018 Student Session.

Erbach, K., P. Sutton, H. Filip, and K. Byrdeck. 2017. Object Mass Nouns in Japanese. Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium.

Conference presentations

2019. Erbach, K and D. Kheder. The Mass/Count Distinction in Sorani Kurdish. The 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, New York, New York.

2019. Erbach, K and V. Skrimpa. Object Mass Nouns in Greek. The 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, New York, New York.

2019. Anderson, C., K Erbach, and R. van de Vijver. Intonation and evaluation with some-exclamatives. The 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, New York, New York.

2018. A unified analysis of plural nouns in Greek. Sinn und Bedeutung 23. Barcelona, Spain. September 5-7.

2018. Fighting for a share of the covers: Accounting for inaccessible readings of plural predicates. ESSLLI 2018 Student Session. Sofia, Bulgaria. August 6-17.

2018. with P. Sutton, H. Filip, & K. Byrdeck. Object Mass as an Arbiter for the Mass/Count Category. The Count-Mass Distinction – A Linguistic Misunderstanding?, Bochum, Germany. May 9.

2018. with H. Filip, P. Sutton, & K. Byrdeck. Object Mass Nouns Nouns in Japanese. One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics workshop at The 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society, Stuttgart, Germany. March 7.

2018. Plurals have magnitude. The 19th Szklarska Poreba Workshop. Szklarska-Poreba, Poland. February 26.

2018. with Anderson, C. (first author) and R. van de Vijver Intonation and evaluative bias in some-exclamatives. 19th Szklarska Poreba Workshop. Szklarska Poreba, Poland. February 23.

2018. with P. Sutton, H. Filip, and K. Byrdeck. Object Mass Nouns in Japanese. The 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, Salt Lake City, UT, January 6.

2017. with P. Sutton, H. Filip, and K. Byrdeck. Object Mass Nouns in Japanese. The 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, December 21.

2017. with H. Filip, and P. Sutton. Hungarian measure phrases, bare singular nouns, and mass/count distinction. Twelfth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Lagodekhi, Georgia, September 19.

2017. with K. Byrdeck, P. Sutton, H. Filip. Object Mass Nouns in Japanese. The 18th Szklarska Proeba Workshop. March 7.

2017. Bare nouns in Hungarian and the mass/count distinction. The 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, Austin, TX, January 7.

Last updated

18.12.2019