Accounts of the Count-Mass Distinction: A Critical Survey

0. Introduction The issue of what is usually, but also misleadingly (see below) called the count-mass distinction, i.e. the grammatical distinction between nouns that can be counted (e.g. a car, two cars, many cars) and nouns that cannot (e.g. *a sand, *two sands, *many sands, sand, much sand), has been addressed and accounted for in different ways. This paper aims at giving a critical survey of the main theoretical positions in the count-mass literature, to point out that each of them is problematic in some way. That is in line with Benninger’s (1999) basic point, but whereas she contents herself with merely observing that “en ce qui concerne l’origine de l’opposition massif/comptable, tout dépend du point de vue que l’on adopte” (p. 31), I commit myself to show how a proper characterisation of the count-mass distinction can be given if a serious attempt is made to reconcile the different theoretical positions. One of the basic reasons for the wide-ranging differences in opinions is, I think, that linguists and philosophers who have dealt with the countmass distinction have found it extremely difficult to stick to their set out criteria. In the count-mass distinction different dimensions of linguistic analysis appear to converge, and it is no coincidence, therefore, that grammatical, ontological, semantic, and contextual matters have frequently been confused. The most illustrative example of this is the term count-mass distinction itself: that term is misleading, since it incautiously takes together a primarily grammatical criterion (the (non-)countability of nouns) with a non-grammatical, ontological criterion (the denotation of mass vs. discrete entities). I will continue to use it for convenience’s sake, though count-noncount distinction, as proposed by a.o. Quirk et al. (1985, p. 246), would be a more appropriate term.