Abstract
This article is devoted to studying the linguistic distinction between massive names (milk, furniture, whiteness, trust, etc.) and accountancy names (cat, team, combat, etc.). The former are normally invariable, while the latter are freely used in the singular and plural. The book examines whether this morpho-syntactic distinction can be described in semantic terms. Research on this issue mainly concerns names applying to the material or even temporal domain. On the contrary, this work examines in detail both concrete and abstract names. It shows that all massive names can be referred to as distributive and cumulative references, provided that these properties are understood in a new way. As for the accounting names, they appear to have no basic semantic property in common.