Issues of mass and count: Dealing with 'dual-life' nouns

Abstract

The topics of +MASS and +COUNT have been studied for many decades in philosophy (e.g., (Quine, 1960; Pelletier, 1975)), linguistics (e.g., (McCawley, 1975; Allan, 1980; Krifka, 1991)) and psychology (e.g., (Middleton et al., 2004; Barner et al., 2009). More recently, interest from within computational linguistics has studied the issues involved (e.g., (Pustejovsky, 1991; Bond, 2005; Schmidtke and Kuperman, 2016)), to name just a few. As is pointed out in these works, there are many difficult conceptual issues involved in the study of this contrast. In this article we study one of these issues - the "Dual-Life" of being simultaneously +MASS and +COUNT - by means of an unusual combination of human annotation, online lexical resources, and online corpora.