Most analyses of the count/mass distinction start with a small set of nouns, which serve to illustrate some salient properties. In our project Accounting for the Foundations of Mass we explore the count/mass distinction in English nouns empirically on the level of the noun-sense.
For this purpose we annotated different syntactic and semantic properties of the individual senses of nouns which resulted in BECL (Bochum English Countability Lexicon) - a lexicon of English noun-senses with annotated countability classes. The latest release can be requested as follows.
We gladly share the BECL for not-for-profit researchers at other universities.
You can get access via the LDSL Github Repository: github.com/Linguistic-Data-Science-Lab/BECL
Whenever you use it, please cite BECL as following:
Kiss, Tibor; Pelletier, F. Jeffry; Husic, Halima; Poppek, Johanna Marie; Simunic, R. Nino (2016) A Sense-Based Lexicon for Count and Mass Expressions: The Bochum English Countability Lexicon. In: Proceedings of LREC 2016. Portoroz, Slowenia.
