The purpose of this chapter is to examine which features of the three mainEnglish sentence-types make these sentence-types compatible with theperformance of (indirect) speech acts. I am mainly concerned with formalapproaches to indirect communication and I focus on the semantics ofimperatives, the semantics of interrogatives and that of declaratives.

the internal structuring of lexical plurals reflects the typology of singular mass nouns (i.e. compact, dense, granular aggregates, collectives/superordinates).

Linguistic theory has provided different formalizations regarding the issue of countability, but it has hardly ever measured the occurrence of nouns as mass and as count in language use. This work illustrates a rating study on subjective frequency of Italian nouns inflected in the singular and in the plural. The rating scores were compared to the corpus frequency of nouns in mass and count contexts. The results suggest that in Italian almost every noun can occur as countable. Moreover, negative correlations were never found between the count use and the mass use of nouns. These results are discussed with respect to the different theoretical accounts.

The goal of this book was threefold: describe the theoretical complexity ofISAs, explain how people manage to interpret them correctly and understandwhy speakers resort to them.

In this chapter, I present the notion of an indirect speech act originatingin Searle's classic speech act theory and I discuss how other accounts inthe field of philosophy of language have revisited this notion.

It is often assumed that plurality and countability are necessarily related. One way of expressing this might be as follows: Counting the number of cats involves determining how many individual cats there are. “There are four cats on the sofa” is true if the plural individual on the sofa is made up of four discrete, non-overlapping single individual cats. It is thus natural that the set of individual cats is grammatically salient and marked in contrast to the plural set. Since we do not count mud, and mud does not come in inherently individuable stable units, there is no set denoting single units of mud and the singular/plural contrast is not relevant. In We ordered here two coffees, three beers and one water the plural marker indicates that the noun has shifted to a count interpretation. Theories differ as to why mud is mass and why, unlike coffee or water, it cannot shift to a count interpretation, but the assumption that the lack of countability and the lack of pluralization are related is pretty widely assumed. The goal of this paper is to explore the relation between countability and plurality, especially in examples like the one with two coffees, three beers, one water.

Language is much more than a simple code for exchanging information. It isfirst and foremost used to interact with one another through the performanceof actions such as warning about a state of affairs (Your train isleaving in five minutes), asking a question (When doesyour train leave?), wishing someone good luck (Have anice trip!), telling someone what to do (Show me yourtrain ticket). These actions, which are accomplished by meansof written or spoken utterances, are called ‘speech acts’(SAs), following the tradition in linguistic pragmatics and the philosophyof language.

This paper provides a corpus-driven investigation into establishing classes of nouns based on grammatical environments relevant to countability, such as combination with cardinal modifiers or appearing as a bare singular. We investigate the countability environments of Allan (1980) and assess their predictive power across a large corpus (350 million words). We show, by applying machine learning methods, that while the environments Allan (1980) distinguishes are predictive, the occurrence of nouns as bare singular and/or bare plural is substantially more powerful as a diagnostic. Using the most important environments, we induce, through automatic clustering, a set of countability classses, which distinguish between varieties of countable, non-countable and pluralia tantum nouns.

In this chapter, I adopt a sociolinguistic perspective to explore politenessand the other reasons explaining the use of indirect communication. I alsodiscuss how contextual variables, in particular interpersonal parameters,shape both the production of indirect utterances and theirinterpretation.

In this chapter, we will offer a new way of analysing the syntax and semantics of the mass/count distinction at the syntax-semantics interface, by synthesising the constructionist framework originating in Borer (2005) with the (lexicalist) `iceberg semantics' proposed in Landman (2011, 2016. We believe that this synthesis has several conceptual and empirical advantages over existing frameworks. It combines the flexibility and morphosyntax-driven nature of constructivism with an explicit role for human conceptual categories such as INDIVIDUAL and SUBSTANCE. It allows us to distinguish between different kinds of mass/count shifts and makes explicit why some of them are harder than others. Furthermore, it clarifies the distinction between stuff-reference, number neutrality and non-countability, three distinct (although interdependent) nominal properties that are often explicitly or implicitly conflated in existing accounts of the mass/count distinction.

This chapter illustrates how computational models of ISA disambiguation havebeen improved and eventually applied to human-like robots in dailyinteractions, taking into account contextual parameters such as uncertaintyabout a speaker's intentions, hierarchical status and politenessexpectations.