  A better attempt would consist, in effect, in attributing a weaker property to mass nouns. As we will see in section 2, an approach based on mereology may well, contrary to what is usually assumed, want to use a non-extensional mereology, where the notion of part is defined in terms of the notion of sum. If distributive reference were understood using such a notion of part, it could avoid the problems mentioned here. There is nothing wrong with that, but then, the property attributed to mass nouns would be much weaker than that originally advocated by its partisans (see Nicolas 2002, chapter 3, for a proposal of this kind).  The claim made here is simply that distributive reference, as usually conceived, is not a property of mass nouns.