Crime Investigations: The Countability Profile of a Delinquent Noun
Journal: The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition Logic and Communication
Year: 2016

This paper aims to broaden our understanding of countability beyond what is found with concrete nouns, providing a one-word case study of the countable and non-countable uses of the noun crime. I show that the behavior of crime runs counter to a variety of expectations inherited from the literature on countability: its countable use cannot be directly grounded in atomic acts or events, nor is its non- countable use simply equivalent to a plural individual composed of individual crimes, as one mi