An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms

A mass term is a term like ‘water’, ‘gold’, ‘information’, ‘green ink’, ‘green ink which has been diluted’, etc. The first three of these, ‘water’, ‘gold’, and ‘information’ are simple mass nouns; the others are complex terms built up from mass nouns plus modifiers. Strictly speaking, it is occurrences of words, or something of the sort, which count as mass nouns, for the same word can occur both as a mass noun and as a count noun. For example, ‘chicken’ is a mass noun in ‘I had some chicken for dinner’, or in ‘We had chicken for dinner’; it is a count noun in ‘Our cat caught a chicken’ and in ‘Some chickens got into the garden’. In the sentence ‘I looked, but I saw no chicken’, the word ‘chicken’ is ambiguous between its count noun sense (‘I didn’t see any chickens’) and its mass noun sense (‘I didn’t see any chicken (meat)’). The task of giving complete and explicit criteria for isolating out mass nouns is a detailed task which I will ignore here; I will assume enough competence at recognizing mass nouns to evaluate the analysis given below.2