Object mass nouns, such as furniture, are mass, but they allow quantity evaluations and comparisons in terms of a cardinal scale. This paper addresses the vexing question of how such cardinal comparisons are possible for object mass nouns, given that, as mass nouns, these expressions are not countable. Building upon her theory of count nouns based on semantic atomicity (entities that are indexed to counting contexts), and on her work on the distinction between counting and measuring and the semantics of measure functions, Rothstein proposes a treatment of quantity evaluations for object mass nouns based on measure comparisons using values on a cardinality scale which, unlike counting does not require access to a set of semantic atoms. Rothstein then extends this analysis and argues that two types of estimation operations have grammatical properties associated with measuring: Russian approximative inversion, and cardinality estimation in Mandarin.

Chierchia (2010) argues that object mass nouns constitute a good testing ground for theories of the mass/count distinction, given that these nouns constitute a non-canonical type of mass noun that seems to be restricted to number marking languages (excluding outliers like Greek which admit plural morphology on mass nouns). Taking this idea as a springboard, in this paper, we pose the questions: Are there object mass nouns in classifier languages such as Japanese? What does the answer to this question mean for semantic accounts of the mass/count distinction in classifier languages?