Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with `Dual-Life' Nouns
Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Halima Husić, Johanna Marie Poppek · 2017
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;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 being simultaneously +MASS and +COUNT -by means of an unusual combination of human annotation, online lexical resources, and online corpora.