  According to Gillon (1992), a sentence containing a mass noun may receive so-called “collective” and “distributive” construals, modulo the meaning of the particular lexical items composing the sentence, context of speech and knowledge of the world. (Sentences containing plurals also receive such construals. This is well documented by Gillon (1992, 1996) and Schwarzschild (1996). This may be confirmed by replacing mass nouns with plurals in the examples we give below.)