  But more generally, it seems that there are no necessary and sufficient semantic conditions that would specify what mass nouns are and what count nouns are (see Gillon 1992, Koslicki 1999, and Nicolas 2002 for detailed arguments to this effect[3]; a contrario, see for instance Landman 2011). A common noun that is mass in a language (like luggage in English) may be count in another (like bagage in French). The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns should be drawn syntactically. A key feature of count nouns is that they admit the singular / plural contrast while mass nouns do not. So languages that do not mark the singular / plural contrast could lack count nouns and all their common nouns function in a similar way as mass nouns do in English. This might the case of certain classifier languages, like Mandarin (Chierchia 1998,  2010).[4] Alternatively, the mass / count distinction could just fail to apply to such languages. The proper way to draw the mass / count distinction across languages is still debated (see Doetjes 2012, Rothstein 2017, and Bale &amp; Barner 2018 for cross-linguistic overviews).