Editing Mass noun (section)

==Grammatical number and physical discreteness==

In English (and in many other languages), there is a tendency for nouns referring to liquids (''water'', ''juice''), powders (''sugar'', ''sand''), or substances (''metal'', ''wood'') to be used in mass syntax, and for nouns referring to objects or people to be count nouns. But there are many exceptions: the mass/count distinction is a property of the ''terms'', not their referents. For example, the same set of chairs can be referred to as "seven chairs" (count) and as "furniture" (mass); the Middle English mass noun ''pease'' has become the count noun ''pea'' by [[morphological reanalysis]]; "vegetables" are a plural count form, while the British English slang synonym "veg" is a mass noun.

In languages that have a [[partitive case]], the distinction is explicit and mandatory. For example, in [[Finnish language|Finnish]], ''join vettä'', "I drank (some) water", the word ''vesi'', "water", is in the partitive case. The related sentence ''join veden'', "I drank (the) water", using the [[accusative case]] instead, assumes that there was a specific countable portion of water that was completely drunk.

The work of logicians like [[Godehard Link]] and [[Manfred Krifka]] established that the mass/count distinction can be given a precise, mathematical definition in terms of [[quantization (linguistics)|quantization]] and [[cumulativity]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothstein |first1=Susan |author1-link=Susan Rothstein |title=Counting and the Mass/Count Distinction |journal=Journal of Semantics |date=27 August 2010 |volume=27 |issue=3 |pages=349, 351 |doi=10.1093/jos/ffq007 |url=https://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/f11/na/docs/rothstein10.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/f11/na/docs/rothstein10.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |access-date=27 September 2022}}</ref>