日本哲学会会长、日本大学教授Takashi Iida将于9月15-16日在北大哲学系做两次讲演，现将第一次报告的相关情况公告如下，第二次报告相关情况敬请等待通知：

报告题目：Mass/count distinction in a classifier language

报告时间：9月15日15:10-18:00

报告地点：三教506

报 告 人：日本哲学会会长、日本大学教授Takashi Iida

报告摘要：The recent development of plural logic has been a good news for a student of the semantics of a language like Japanese which has no systematic distinction between singular and plural. But plural logic is applicable only to countable predicates; it is not applicable to non-countable predicates. Thus, the first question that must be settled before we may apply plural logic to Japanese is to make sure that it has countable predicates.

    I argue that Japanese has indeed countable predicates and that they can be recognized by a kind of numeral suffixes which can modify them. Japanese numeral suffixes are divided into three classes, namely, (1) sortal suffixes, or classifiers, (2) unit-forming suffixes, and (3) measure suffixes; they can be distinguished from each other by a certain simple test. I argue that a sortal suffix's contribution to the meaning of a sentence in which it occurs is not to its truth-conditional content but to its conventional implicature only, and hence that a noun which typically occurs with a sortal suffix has an individuating force by itself.

    On the basis of the above, we can single out a class of count nouns. The resulting distinction between count nouns and non-count nouns largely coincides with the count/mass distinction, and we argue that, in contrast to what is commonly thought, this distinction is more robust in a classifier language like Japanese than in a number-sensitive language like English.