Countability shifts in the normative dimension

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss what we argue is a newly observed use of nouns like woman, man, and lawyer, in the sort of morphosyntax characteristic of count nouns. We argue that the relevant data constitutes normative uses of the relevant nouns, and we build an analysis on the assumption that such nouns are polysemous between descriptive and normative senses (Leslie, 2015), using the formal account of polysemy in Pustejovsky (1998) and the analysis of countability in Rothstein (2010). In doing so, we provide evidence in support of the aforementioned kinds of analyses of social terms and countability, as opposed to others which do not seem to be able to account for the data in a straightforward a way.