Shifting interpretations: Count and mass in linguistic categorization

The present paper discusses novel data pertaining to the count / mass distinction, including examples where constructions like two turkeys count portions of food rather than instances of the animal and much tongue measures amount of tongue used in kissing events rather than amount of ground tongue as standardly assumed. It is argued that these kinds of constructions are systematic and that they can be captured with more fine-grained semantic shifts than are usually discussed in analyses of countability. It is further argued that such data helps account for the complexity of countability categories between canonical count nouns like car and rigidly mass nouns like equipment.