ABSTRACT
In a number of works, L. Gleitman has been developing an approach to the acquisition of the meaning of lexical items that she dubs "syntactic bootstrapping" in contraposition to semantic bootstrapping. Gleitman's work essentially deals with the meaning of verbs. This chapter suggests that some form of syntactic bootstrapping is also present in the acquisition of the mass-count distinction in nouns. It discusses how such an algorithm fares vis-a-vis relevant experimental data and what role syntactic bootstrapping plays in it. One key element of the mass/count phenomenology is its behavior vis-a-vis pluralization. From an intuitive standpoint, pluralization is a morphological operation on nouns. The chapter shows how the learning of the mass/count distinction might proceed on the basis of the present approach. G. Link assumed a homomorphism from the count algebra into the mass algebra instead of a function that gives the spatiotemporal location of mass and count objects.
