Count Nouns vs Mass Nouns

This chapter reviews foundational issues in the semantics of the mass/count distinction, and recent empirical data which have impacted the discussion of foundational issues fundamentally. I review four basic semantic proposals about the count/mass distinction: (i) that mass nouns and count nouns have their denotations in different domains; (ii) that mass nouns are inherently plural; (iii) that vagueness is at the root of the count/mass distinction; and (iv) that the count/mass distinction is related to operations of counting and measuring. I present recent work on object mass nouns, on crosslinguistic variation, and on mass-to-count and count-to-mass shifts, and discuss its relevance for the foundational issues. Finally I mention some recent developments in mass/count research.