The nature of the mass-count distinction is subject to debate in philosophical and linguistic literature. One of the questions has to do with the very existence of the distinction at the word-level. Do nouns like water and chair differ in any grammatically relevant way? According to Borer's (2005) influential book, the answer is negative. All nouns are “born" as mass; count readings surface only if a noun appears in “count syntax". Thus, atomicity is contributed by a Div head that appears above the NP and hosts such units as classifiers and plural morphemes.
The present talk challenges this view using novel evidence coming from the domain of derivational morphology. We will discuss the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of several Russian suffixes whose meaning and distribution is sensitive to the distinction between mass and count stems, as well as to the notion of a natural unit (Krifka 1989). Properties of these suffixes provide evidence that the mass-count distinction characterizes nouns at a very low stage of the derivation, meaning that the difference between water and chair is real and grammatically relevant.
