Accounts of the Count-Mass Distinction: A Critical Survey

Accounts of the Count-Mass Distinction: A Critical Survey

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The issue of what is usually, but also misleadingly called the count-mass distinction, i.e.the 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 gives a critical survey Protective Clothing of four main theoretical views on the distinction and points out that each of them is problematic in some way.It is argued that that the count-mass distinction should not CLO LEMON be reduced to an exclusively grammatical, ontological, semantic, or contextual issue.

A proper characterisation of the distinction can only be given if its multidimensional character is fully acknowledged and if parameters such as basic count- or masshood, degree of lexicalisation, conceptualisation, and (non)arbitrariness are taken into account.