  Distributive, collective, and intermediate construals: sentences with concrete mass nouns or plurals may receive so-called distributive, collective, and intermediate construals (cf. section 8 above). Is it also the case with abstract mass nouns? Nicolas (2010) suggests that this is so. Take the sentence The strength of these men is impressive, uttered in a context where two strong teams are competing. The sentence can assert that the strength of each team is impressive. This corresponds to a construal which is neither distributive (the strength of each man is impressive), nor collective (the strength of the men all together is impressive), but intermediate between distributive and collective. Nicolas shows that these construals can be accounted for by Gillon’s (1996) rule for the interpretation of complex noun phrases containing a prepositional phrase.