Mass Terms: A Philosophical Introduction

Complex phrases are also brought into the categorization, so that cutlery that is in the drawer and hot water are mass phrases while tree that is in the park and tall person are count phrases. I use ‘mass term’ and ‘count term’ to cover both nouns and more complex noun phrases. (As well, some theorists admit other grammatical categories into the count/mass realm: some verb phrases and some adjectives have been argued to be mass/count, but I won’t follow up that line of thought in this Overview.) When one focuses on the syntactic aspects of mass vs. count, we are told that count terms syntactically admit numeral modifiers and quantifiers that presuppose a method of counting, but mass terms do not; and related to this is the fact that count terms but not mass terms can be pluralized. The issues discussed in this Overview are developed in more detail in Pelletier and Schubert [1989/2003].