Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with ‘Dual-Life’ Nouns

Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017), pages 189–198, Vancouver, Canada, August 3-4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with ‘Dual-Life’ Nouns Tibor Kiss Ruhr-Universit¨at Bochum 44801 Bochum, Germany tibor@linguistics.rub.de Francis Jeffry Pelletier University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada francisp@ualberta.ca Halima Husi´c Ruhr-Universit¨at Bochum 44801 Bochum, Germany husic@linguistics.rub.de Johanna Poppek Ruhr-Universit¨at Bochum 44801 Bochum, Germany poppek@linguistics.rub.de Abstract The topics of +MASS and +COUNT have been studied for many decades in philosophy (e.g., (Quine, 1960; Pelletier, 1975)), lin- guistics (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 be- ing simultaneously +MASS and +COUNT – by means of an unusual combination of hu- man annotation, online lexical resources, and online corpora. 1 Background The standard story of +MASS and +COUNT usually starts with some examples of nouns of both sorts. • +COUNT: car, dog, idea, university, belief, ... • +MASS: water, garbage, advice, oil, admira- tion, knowledge. . . These examples are usually accompanied by some syntactic tests for +MASS and +COUNT: • Count terms can be pluralized, occur with in- definite determiner, allow numeral modifiers, occur with the quantifiers each, every, .... Mass terms can’t do any of these. • Always occurring in the singular, mass terms occur with “measure” terms (e.g., much), with the quantifiers most, all and the un- stressed some, and bare in (e.g.) subject po- sition with singular verb agreement. Singular count terms can’t do any of these. These lead to such comparisons as (1) a. a car, four ideas, each university c.b. *a water, *four garbage, *each admiration all garbage, most water, advice is helpful d. *all dog, *most university, *car is fast It can be seen from this brief (and partial) de- scription of the +MASS/+COUNT distinction that the presumption is that the distinction applies to lexi- cal nouns and that it is exhaustive and exclusive – every such noun is either +COUNT or +MASS, and no noun is both. Our account will deny all these presumptions, and in doing so will open what we find to be a much more plausible account of various myste- rious phenomena surrounding +MASS and +COUNT (although in this study we just examine the “dual- life” case). 2 Some Background Methodological Issues A fundamental feature of (and, we think, a prob- lem with) with the “usual story” is that it presumes that the locus or home of +MASS and +COUNT is the lexical noun. This is a feature of modern analyses as well as the older ones despite the fact that even in the oldest of the works we …

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