Towards a Common Semantics for English Count and Mass Nouns

Abstract

Abstract The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns, first remarked upon by Jespersen (1909, vol. 2, ch. 5.2) in connection with English, is found in a number of the world’s languages, including Chinese, Tamil, German, and French. In English, the most common way to distinguish these two classes of words is syntactic. Cardinal numerals and quasi-cardinal numerals (e.g., “several”) modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Moreover, “little” and “much” modify mass nouns, never count nouns, whereas “few” and “many” modify count nouns, never mass nouns. Count nouns admit a morphological contrast between singular and plural; mass nouns do not, being almost always singular. The pronoun “one” may have as its antecedent a count noun, not a mass noun (Baker 1978. ch. 10.1). Mass nouns with singular morphology 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.