On the Semantics and the Ontology of the Mass‐Count Distinction

ABSTRACT The mass‐count distinction is a morpho‐syntactic distinction among nouns in English and many other languages. Tree, chair, person, group , and portion are count nouns, which come with the plural and accept numerals such as one and first ; water, rice, furniture, silverware , and law enforcement are mass nouns, which lack the plural and do not accept numerals. The morpho‐syntactic distinction is generally taken to have semantic content or reflect a semantic mass‐count distinction. At the center of the semantic mass‐count distinction is, in some way or another, a notion of being one or being a single entity, the basis of countability. There is little unanimity, however, of how the notion of being a single entity is to be understood and thus what the semantic mass‐count distinction consists in. The question of the content of the mass‐count distinction and thus the notion of a single object relates to broader philosophical issues, such as the question whether predicates apply to things as such or things under a part‐structure related perspective, the question whether language involves an ontology at an intermediary level distinct from that of reality or even nonlinguistic cognition, and the question whether the semantics of mass nouns requires different logical tools than the ones used in standard semantic analyses (as has been argued for plurals by proponents of plural logics). In what follows, I will give a general presentation of the phenomenon of the mass‐count distinction as well as an outline of current approaches to the mass‐count distinction that ought to be of particular interest to philosophers. The focus will be on very general features and motivations of semantic theories of the mass‐count distinction which lend themselves to more philosophical discussions, rather than the details of the various formal developments. I will mainly discuss extension‐based and integrity‐based approaches, which have been most widely adopted, but which both face significant challenges. I will briefly mention a third approach, the reference‐based approach, whose aim is to overcome those challenges, by taking mass reference to be more primitive than singular and plural reference and not to be reducible to the latter.