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The hypothesis explored in this paper is that the amount of object mass nouns (e.g. furniture, jewelry) in a given language is related to the amount of morphosyntax that indicates the countability nouns (e.g. many, much) in that language. This hypothesis, together with the analysis of Sutton & Filip (2016) best captures the occurrence of object mass nouns across languages. The analysis of Sutton & Filip (2016) accurately predicts which class of nouns will have object mass nouns across languages-collective artifacts-and the novel hypothesis provides a means of predicting the amount of object mass nouns in a given language: languages with many morphosyntactic reflexes of the mass/count distinction will likewise have many object mass nouns-e.g. English-and languages with few morphosyntactic reflexes of the mass/count distinction will likewise have few object mass nouns-e.g. Greek, Hungarian, and Japanese.

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