I will illustrate and discuss the extent to which grammars may vary vis-à-vis the mass/count distinction with three main phenomena and use this as a springboard for outlining a theory of semantic variation, with a universal logical basis. The first form of variation concerns the most widespread empirical test associated with the mass/count distinction, namely how noun phrases (NPs) combine with numerals. The second is that of the so called ‘fake’ mass nouns (like furniture). The third concerns alternations between mass vs. count interpretations of nouns like beer or chicken.

In this chapter, I consider the cognitive linguistic, relevance theoretic andgraded salience approaches to utterance interpretation. What they have incommon is that they view indirectness as a graded notion, not defined interms of a relationship between a sentence and a type of SA.

The term count/mass distinction, despite its success as a name for a domain of research, suggests a symmetry between count and mass that is not supported by cross-linguistic data. A first asymmetry is related to the grammatical encoding of count vs. mass. A second asymmetry between count and mass is related to the sensitivity of quantity expressions to count and mass meaning and count morphology. A third asymmetry concerns possible meanings of nouns. Whereas there is strong evidence that an opposition between count and mass meanings plays an important role in the lexicon even of languages that seem at first mass-only, there do seem to exist count-only languages. The second part of the paper will consider count meanings across languages. What types of meanings are count? What are reliable diagnostics for count meaning? Are there differences in this respect between obligatory number marking languages (also commonly called ‘mass/count languages’) and languages that do not have obligatory number?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the properties and distribution of the classifier -ah in Arabic. The investigation will turn out to shed light on the count-mass distinction in general, and in Arabic in particular, and will result in identifying two distinct types of plural markers, differing in their semantics, in their morphology, and in their syntax, one corresponding roughly to the type of plural marker found in English, at times referred to as inclusive, and the other returning solely exclusive plural reading. It will also result in motivating a structural distinction between quantifiers and cardinals, with the latter merging below the former.

We discuss the range of possible readings of the pseudo-partitive construction (henceforth PPC), such as (two) glasses/litres of milk. In particular, we discuss ‘container readings’, ‘contents readings’, ‘free portion readings’, and ‘ad hoc measure readings’. We argue against Partee & Borschev, 2012, who for Asher-style dot-types to accommodate co-predications of pairs of these readings, and propose mereology plus a simple type theory in a dynamic semantics. We also provide an analysis of at hoc measure PPCs and use this to explain why measure interpretations of PPCs where mass concepts are coerced into count concepts are hard to obtain.

This chapter provides a history of theorizing about the count-mass distinction, a summary of the many different syntactic and semantic tests that are used to characterize the distinction, and summaries of the different chapters in this volume.

We propose that pluralization of bare nouns in Western Armenian and Turkish is a two-step process. First, the noun is atomized giving a singular form (this is achieved via a null exponent of number under Num) and a new noun is created providing a brand new semi-lattice to serve as the underlying semantic domain. Second, the higher NumP operates morphosyntactically on the singular, and returns a set of atoms from the semi-lattice introduced by the higher n. This is a case of morphological compositionality where one number is built out of another. Our proposal gives a satisfying solution to the puzzle of how “indeterminate nouns” in these languages can express singularity and plurality, depending on the context.

Chierchia (2010) argues that object mass nouns constitute a good testing ground for theories of the mass/count distinction, given that these nouns constitute a non-canonical type of mass noun that seems to be restricted to number marking languages (excluding outliers like Greek which admit plural morphology on mass nouns). Taking this idea as a springboard, in this paper, we pose the questions: Are there object mass nouns in classifier languages such as Japanese? What does the answer to this question mean for semantic accounts of the mass/count distinction in classifier languages?

I discuss how syntactic and semantic theories of number interact with different accounts of the mass-count distinction as a way to figure out the relationship between number features and countability, and to give theoretical explanations of why furniture-like nouns cannot combine with numerals. I argue that certain accounts of number marking “force one’s hand” in terms of the semantic representation of mass and count NPs. “High number” theories only work if either (i) the denotations of mass NPs are necessarily disjoint from the denotations of count NPs or (ii) mass NPs are assigned a different type than count NPs. I discuss three types of semantic analyses of the mass-count distinction. One maintains two disjoint domains—one mass, the other count. Another maintains a single domain but assigns different semantic types to mass and count NPs respectively. A third maintains a single domain and a single type for all NPs but accounts for distributional differences by appealing to either syntactic features or certain denotational characteristics (join-closure, atomicity, etc.). I discuss how these three approaches interact “high number” theories and “low number” theories

This chapter presents the results of a pilot study where participants performed three tests with bare nouns in comparative constructions (affirmatives and interrogatives): (i) acceptability; (ii) picture matching; and (iii) quantity judgment. The independent variable is the noun phrase, with five levels: Bare Singular, Bare Plural, singular and plural Flexible Nouns, and Mass nouns. Four languages were investigated: English, Rioplatense Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Cape Verdean. The results show that the BS is the locus of variation; plural and mass nouns are stable across these languages. We argue that the Bare Singular in English and Rioplatense Spanish is an atomic predicate which is coerced to mass when in a cumulative context, such as comparison. In Brazilian Portuguese and in Cape Verdean, it is interpreted by cardinality, but for different reasons in the two languages. In CV, the Bare Singular is a variant of the Bare Plural, i.e. a number neutral noun. In Brazilian Portuguese its interpretation oscillates between cardinal and no-cardinal readings. We then argue it behaves as predicted by Pelletier (2012) – it is both mass and count.

In this paper, we discuss the implications for theories of the count/mass distinction that can be derived from the development of a large lexicon of English count and mass noun sense pairs, the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL). The development of a lexicon for count and mass senses makes it possible that research on the count/mass distinction moves away from individual nouns and takes lexical variation into account. We focus on different types of ambiguity. The most important finding is that English shows a rather small class of nouns which are truly ambiguous with regard to the count/mass distinction, but not in any other respect. We suggest that these nouns show how the count/mass distinction is introduced into a language (which rests on the plausible assumption that all nouns begin their lives as mass nouns). The addition of denotational structure to provide individuation leads to an eventual petrification, which accounts for the somewhat surprising fact that there are many more count than mass nouns.