  Take the noun water. The view is that this noun denotes the sum of all the water that there is. The notion of sum involved here can be characterized formally, as done in mereology (cf. Varzi 2016, Cotnoir &amp; Varzi forthcoming). Intuitively, suppose there is some water in a bottle, a, and some water in a cup, b. Then we can also refer to the water in the bottle and the cup. This is a bigger portion of water, the sum of a and b, noted a∨b (or a+b). a is part of a∨b, and so is b. More generally, we can sum all the portions of water together. This is a very big portion of water, which is the denotation of the noun water. Mass predication is then interpreted in terms of these associated notions of sum and parthood: