  There are many similarities between the semantics of mass nouns and plurals, cf. sections 5, 6, and 8. Also, at a very intuitive level, if there are eight pieces of silverware on the table, then the speaker seems to refer to eight things at once when he says: The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy. If this intuition is taken seriously, then a mass noun isn’t a singular term. Rather, it is a non-singular term that may refer to one or several things at once.