The thesis gives an overview of the mereological understanding of substance nouns as a semantic subcategory of mass nouns, paying attention to topological extensions as well. In the first part of the thesis, I summarize the mereological assumptions about the nature of mass nouns (the notion of a scattered entity). I then define basic mereological notions and properties related to countability (atomicity, divisibility, cumulativity) and describe the formal relation between the referents of count and mass nouns in the framework of Link's mereological theory. The linking section focuses on research from the field of cognitive science that challenges mereological assumptions about countability and addresses the need for a new way of characterising entities. In the second part, I define basic mereotopological notions and provide some examples of topological configurations. Then I turn to a mereotopological treatment of substance nouns.
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