Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with `Dual-Life' Nouns
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; Allen, 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 {\&} 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.
PDF Abstract
