Metaphorical measure expressions

Abstract

We present an analysis of measure phrases such as heap/ounce of information in which the measure expression receives a non-literal, metaphorical interpretation. We present evidence that these metaphorical measure expressions, as we call them, exhibit a puzzling in- complete countability pattern insofar as their grammatical reflexes fall between count and mass nouns. We show that nouns/NPs with such an incomplete countability pattern are predicted by, and are easily captured within, the theory of the count/mass distinction presented in Sutton and Filip (2019b, 2020).