On the Semantics and the Ontology of the Mass-Count Distinction
Friederike Moltmann
March 2025 

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns in English and many other languages. 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 unity or being a single entity, the basis of countability. There is little unanimity, however, of how that notion is to be understood and thus what the semantic mass-count distinction consists in. The paper gives a critical presentation of existing approaches to the mass-count distinction, focusing on a distinction between extension-based and integrity-based approaches. It will briefly mention a potential alternative, reference-based approach. The overall aim of the article is to link linguistic research on the mass-count distinction to issues of particular interests to philosophers, such as the notion of unity (single objecthood) itself and the status of the ontology that appears to be reflected in the mass-count distinction.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006361 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Philosophy Compass 20(3), 2025
keywords:	mass-count, classifiers, situations, ontology, semantics
previous versions:	v5 [February 2025] v4 [February 2025] v3 [December 2024] v2 [December 2024] v1 [December 2021]
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