Noun

The noun as a lexical entry: its citation form and its gloss, everything a noun of any language carries. A proper name extends the entry with the gender it restricts its referent to, where it does, and projects as a third-person PROPN token; it is its own type rather than a flag on the noun, since a name has no countability or plural and the syntax projects it as a different head. A language with gender extends the entry with the controller gender in its own carrier, the gender the language's assignment rules give the noun, and with the gender the noun restricts its referents to where it does, as mother and father do, the facet every semantic core distinguishing masculine from feminine reads; the facets particular rules read besides, animacy, rationality, declension class or accent, are the fields of the fragments' further extensions. Whether a noun's gender is natural is a question about its language's semantic rules (Gender.IsNatural). A classified noun records the ways a numeral counts it: without a classifier, as in three cups, or with one, as in Mandarin sān běn shū 'three CL book'. A noun that no numeral counts in either way, such as milk, is counted only through a measure word, as in three cups of milk, and a count noun is one some numeral counts.

Main definitions

• Noun: the noun entry.
• ProperName: the entry of a name, with the gender it restricts its referent to and its Word token.
• GenderedNoun G: the entry with its controller gender over the carrier G and the gender it restricts its referents to.
• ClassifiedNoun C: the entry with the ways a numeral counts it, over the carrier C of classifiers.
• ClassifiedNoun.IsCount, ClassifiedNoun.IsBareCount, ClassifiedNoun.classifiers: some numeral counts the noun, a numeral counts it without a classifier, and the classifiers it is counted with.

Implementation notes

The general concept takes the plain name and the specializations extend it, as in mathlib. A fragment's extension is its own Noun, in its namespace; a file that opens that namespace qualifies the name, the root Noun being in scope too. A noun that is count in one use and mass in another, many seeds and much seed, has an entry for each class.

IsCount is a diagnostic of the numeral construction. It sorts Mandarin nouns by whether they take a count-classifier, with Cheng and Sybesma, where Chierchia makes every Mandarin noun mass, and in a language whose numerals combine with every noun it makes every noun count. A language without classifiers takes C := Empty, so a numeral counts its nouns without one or not at all.

References

• Cheng & Sybesma 1999, Bare and not-so-bare nouns and the structure of NP
• Chierchia 1998, Reference to Kinds across Language formalized
• Corbett 1991, Gender formalized