Towards a Common Semantics for English Count and Mass Nouns* 0. Introduction

The distinction be tween mass nouns and count nouns, first r emarked upon by Jespersen (1909, vol. 2, eh. 5.2) in connect ion with English, is found in a number of the world 's languages, including Chinese, Tamil, G e r m a n and French. In English, the most c o m m o n way to distinguish these two classes of words is syntactic. Cardinal numerals and quasi-cardinal numerals (e.g. , "severa l" ) modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Moreover , "l i t t le" and " m u c h " modify mass nouns, never count nouns; whereas '"few" and " m a n y " modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Coun t nouns admit a morphologica l contrast be tween singular and plural; mass nouns do not , being almost always singular. The p ronoun " 'one" may have as its an tecedent a count noun, not a mass noun (Baker 1978, ch. 10.1). Mass nouns with singular morpho logy 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. I t has also been thought that mass nouns and count nouns can be distinguished by what they denote . The two criteria most commonly proposed are: cumulat ivi ty and divisivity of reference. Quine (1960, p. 91) observed that if a mass term such as "wa t e r " is t rue of each of two items then it is t rue of the two items taken together ; and he dubbed this semantical p roper ty of mass terms '"cumulative reference" . This characterization, while apt, does not , however , distinguish mass nouns f rom count nouns; for, as Link (1991, pp. 4 -5 ) has pointed out , cumulat ivi ty of reference also holds of plural count nouns: Just as it is the case that " I f 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