  Various authors have proposed that mass nouns also refer distributively (e.g., Cheng 1973; ter Meulen 1981). Let M be a mass noun. Suppose that we can truly say of something x that This is M (with this referring to x). Then in the same circumstance, for anything y that is part of x, we can also say of y that This is M (with this now referring to y). However, with many mass nouns, the property doesn’t apply when one considers parts that are small enough. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen, but oxygen isn’t water. And with mass nouns like furniture or silverware, the problem appears even more clearly, at the macroscopic level: a table is furniture, a leg of the table is part of the table, but the leg isn’t furniture. Thus, the thesis that mass nouns refer distributively is mistaken (e.g., Gillon 1992; Nicolas 2002).