I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of
mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc.,
differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from
count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc.
Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do
not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a
little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some'
(unstressed) , and this article cannot be used with singular count
terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each',
'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the
indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals
as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically,
philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes
of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are
cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be
true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any
part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that
speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual
objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already
introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count
term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that
space."
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