In this chapter, Krifka proposes a mereotopological formal semantic theory, enriched with a temporal dimension (a spatiotemporal haptomereology) that can account for the individuation of objects and (portions of) substances over time in terms of an ontology that underlies our use of natural language in the sense of Bach’s (1981) natural language metaphysics. Krifka’s spatiotemporal haptomereology can model not only how entities in space are connected but also how entities in time are connected. This, in turn, allows for the definition of solids, liquids, gases, grains, and individuals. For example, a solid in an interval t, t’ is an entity whose interior parts touch the same parts between t and t′. With these theoretical developments, Krifka proposes an account of different types of individuation over time. For example, he proposes that material identity over time can be established via matter individuals: individuals that are understood as identifying the same matter over time. The re-identification of matter over time, it is proposed, is based on the mereotopological notion of maximally self-connected entities described by Grimm, and a haptomereological modeling of change over time.

Granular mass nouns, such as rice, have conceptually, and perceptually, salient entities in their denotations (i.e., individual rice grains). However, these entities are not directly accessible to semantic counting operations, nor can granular mass nouns be coerced into a count interpretation involving such entities. In this paper, Sutton and Filip address why this should be the case. Their analysis is based on the proposal that there are two key ingredients in lexical entries for grammatical counting: the object identifying function, which identifies perceptually or functionally salient entities in a noun’s denotation, and the schema of individuation, which concerns a perspective on these entities relative to a context of utterance. Based on these parameters, as well as on the mereotopological differences between concepts denoting granulars (rice, lentil), as opposed to other Spelke objects (cat, chair), Sutton and Filip show how we can explain why granular nouns exhibit count/mass variation within and between languages. Finally, they outline why the grammatical reflexes of granular nouns is central to understanding countability from a cross-linguistic perspective.

Thischapter focuses on data from Czech, specifically, derived aggregates and complex numerals. Derived aggregates such as list-í (leaf- í- NOM.SG, ‘foliage’) are derived from a count noun (e.g., list) and the suffix -í. Furthermore, aggregates derived with -í are non-count. Grimm and Dočekal discuss three types of complex numerals that are also morphologically derived: derived group numerals, complex numerals for aggregates, and taxonomic numerals. As well as using these data to bolster the support for a view in which aggregates are a distinct kind of non-countable entity from substances, the authorsargue the complexity of the morphosyntactic resources a language can limit the extent to which nouns in that language are mass/count flexible. These data are then modeled in a neo-Krifkan framework, enriched with mereotopology that accounts for taxonomic and group numeral constructions, the sense in which derived aggregates denote clustered individuals (individuals formed of parts that stand in relatedness relations to one another), and why the counting of derived aggregates in Czech is only possible with complex numerals for aggregates.