Abstractions
It is important to point out that Langacker’s schematic characterisation of nouns in terms of bounded or unbounded regions does not necessarily mean that nouns refer to physical objects. As we saw in Chapter 7, many domains do not relate to physical entities but to abstractions like LOVE, HOPE and HAPPINESS. Langacker does not have a fully developed theory of abstract nouns, but he does observe (1987: 207) that the fact that the count/mass dis tinction holds for abstract nouns suggests that these might also be characterised in terms of bounded/unbounded regions. For example, hope can be pluralised and can take the singular indefinite article (e.g. She hasn’t got a hope; her hopes and dreams), while happiness cannot (*a happiness; *happinesses).
Nouns like hope are called deverbal nominalisations, which means that they are nouns derived from verbs. These are argued to have a PROCESS (action rather than matter) as their base, and encode an ‘episode’ bounded in time by a beginning and a finish. Langacker (1987: 208) compares the count noun jump with the mass noun jumping. The count noun profiles a single episode of the process that makes up its base, while the mass noun, because it is unbounded in time, gives rise to a generic reading (jumping is silly).
Figure 16.2 summarises the conceptual properties that distinguish the regions designated by mass nouns and count nouns.
As we have noted previously (see Chapters 4 and 14), entrenched patterns of use give rise to schemas in Langacker’s theory. The noun class schema is represented in (10). Langacker uses the term THING to represent the schematic conceptual content of the noun schema at the semantic pole, and because this is a maximally general schema, the content of the phonological pole is unspecified.
