Object mass nouns and subkind countability

Abstract

We argue for a novel cross-linguistic definition of object mass nouns—e.g. furniture, equipment—that accommodates the novel observation that some can combine with numericals to count subkinds. We present novel data from Hungarian, where certain object mass nouns can combine directly with numericals to count subkinds but not objects—e.g. három sportruházat (`three sportswear’) can refer to three kinds of sportswear but not three pieces of sportswear. This is unexpected, given that the inability to count subkinds is a property of object mass nouns in English (Cowper & Hall 2012, Rothstein 2017, Grimm & Levin 2017, Sutton & Filip 2018). This requires a novel definition of object mass nouns, which has implications for how they are identified across languages.