Towards a common semantics for english count and mass nouns

The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns, first remarked upon by Jespersen (1909, vol. 2, eh. 5.2) in connection with English, is found in a number of the world's languages, including Chinese, Tamil, German and French. In English, the most common way to distinguish these two classes of words is syntactic. Cardinal numerals and quasi-cardinal numerals (e.g., "several") modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Moreover, "little" and "much" modify mass nouns, never count nouns; whereas '"few" and "many" modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Count nouns admit a morphological contrast between singular and plural; mass nouns do not, being almost always singular. The pronoun "'one" may have as its antecedent a count noun, not a mass noun (Baker 1978, ch. 10.1). Mass nouns with singular morphology do not tolerate the indefinite article, whereas singular count nouns do. Finally, mass nouns occur only with the plural form of those quantifiers whose singular and plural forms differ. It has also been thought that mass nouns and count nouns can be distinguished by what they denote. The two criteria most commonly proposed are: cumulativity and divisivity of reference. Quine (1960, p. 91) observed that if a mass term such as "water" is true of each of two items then it is true of the two items taken together; and he dubbed this seman-tical property of mass terms '"cumulative reference". This characterization , while apt, does not, however, distinguish mass nouns from count nouns; for, as Link (1991, pp. 4-5) has pointed out, cumulativity of reference also holds of plural count nouns: Just as it is the case that "If the animals in this camp are horses and the animals in that camp are horses, then the animals in the two camps are horses"; so it is the case thank the audiences in attendance at these presentations for their comments and criticisms. t also thank Peter Simons for written comments on an earlier draft of this paper.