Nouns like jewelry, kitchenware or furniture are challenging for any theory of the count/mass distinction because while they are mass, they share with count nouns the property of being countable, i.e., measurement along a cardinality scale. The traditional view (Chierchia 1998a, 2010; Bale and Barner 2009) rests on the idea that these nouns are lexically specified or marked plural but enter the syntax into a mass frame thus preventing subsequent count properties such as numeral modification or overt plural marking. However, the root morphemes that participate in this class of mass nouns also participate in the class of count nouns giving rise to doublets: jewel-s/ry, kitchen-s/ware. Using data from English and Spanish, I show that object mass nouns are built on top of the same base (i.e., root+n) as count nouns, and argue that object mass marking and number-marking are in overlapping distribution. I provide a theory of the count/mass distinction that explains these properties and that can be extended to explain the variation reported within the object mass class. At a more general level, this proposal illuminates our understanding of the grammatical encoding of the count/mass distinction, countability and the locus of crosslinguisticic variation.
