 But, this stipulation ignores the following kinds of problems. Suppose we accept that syntactic criteria (as covered in  Section 1)  are doing the distinguishing. The problem with this is that every putatively +MASS/-COUNT noun admits of -MASS/+COUNT instances, and we cannot tell the difference based on syntax alone. But if this is so, then we would need “syntactic derivation rules to convert each noun from one to the other category—a terrible syntactic idea (or double entries for every lexical noun—another terrible syntactic idea) … once [this is done] …, then the +MASS/-COUNT features do no syntactic work: they never rule out any construction as ungrammatical on their own” (Pelletier 2011, pp. 22–23).