Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science

The paper examines the mass-count distinction in abstract nouns, starting from the corpus-derived observation that most of the nouns that can be used in count or mass syntactic contexts (“elastic nouns”) are (arguably) abstract. The paper evaluates various tests for mass-count status and different criteria for “abstractness”, proposing seven semi-productive meaning shifts that can result in a transition from mass to count or vice-versa. Section 4.2 addresses the relation between abstract no