Count nouns and mass nouns

In the grammar of English, there is a clear distinction between count nouns, exemplified by loaf and coin in Table 3.2, and mass nouns, exemplified by bread and money. The whole noun vocabulary divides into words that are almost always count nouns (garment for instance), ones that are almost always mass nouns (like clothing) and ambiguous ones which can be used as either mass or count nouns (like cake).

The question marks in Table 3.2 are there because of a special use allowable with some mass nouns, as when bread is taken to denote ‘distinct variety of bread’. For example, one might say of a bakery that it produces “six breads” to mean that it produces ‘six types of bread’: wholewheat, focaccio, French sticks, and so on. Six breads is ungrammatical for attempting to express the meaning ‘six loaves’.

Mass nouns resist being quantified with numbers and plural suffixes or the word many or the singular indefinite article a (right-hand column in Table 3.2), while count nouns (in the left-hand column) can be quantified in this way. Count nouns denote distinguishable whole entities, like beans or people or shirts. They can be counted. Mass nouns are quantified with the word much. They denote undifferentiated substance, like dough or water or lava.

Table 3.2 shows that the difference between count nouns and mass nouns is partly a matter of how the speaker or writer chooses to portray reality. What is out there in the world is pretty much the same whether you are referring to a loaf or to bread; likewise, the denotation of the words coins (and banknotes or bills) is pretty much the same as that of the word money. However, count nouns portray what we are talking about as consisting of individually distinct wholes (loaves, coins, banknotes, bills and so on), while talking about almost the same reality with mass nouns represents it as homogeneous substance, undifferentiated “stuff ”. Another pair that could have been selected to illustrate this is drinks (count) and booze (mass).

It is certainly not the case that when people use mass nouns to talk or write about clothing or bread or money or scenery, that they become incapable of distinguishing shirts from socks, or one sock from another, or seeing boundaries between the lakes, mountains and seascapes that go to make up scenery. They are merely treating scenery or money or what-ever as if “how much” were the only difference there could be between one “dollop” of the stuff and any other dollop of it.

Hyponymy and incompatibility have been illustrated almost entirely with count nouns. However, these two relations exist among mass nouns too. Velvet ‘cloth with a silky nap’, corduroy ‘cloth with a corrugated nap’, gingham and so on are mass nouns that are incompatible hyponyms of the mass noun cloth. (The mass noun cloth is the one seen in How much cloth is produced annually? There is a count noun cloth too, for instance in You’ll never use all these old cloths for wiping oil off your bicycle; throw some of them away.)

Only individuated wholes are represented in English as having parts. Homogenous substance is not separable into distinct parts. Therefore, only count nouns bear has-relations to labels for their parts; mass nouns do not enter the has-relation (except in physical chemistry, but that is another story).

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم الشؤون الطبية يقدم الخدمات الصحية والعلاجية لزائري مدينة سامراء

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تقدم خدماتها لزائري مرقد الإمامين العسكريين (عليهما السلام) في سامراء

المجمَع العلمي ووفد وزارة التربية يبحثان سبل التعاون المشترك

قسم الشؤون الفكرية يصدر العدد 192 من مجلة الرياحين للأطفال

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

ثورة طبية.. الذكاء الاصطناعي يكشف سرطان الكلى في وقت قياسي

لتعزيز الطاقة والتغلب على التعب.. عليك بـ7 طرق بسيطة

لتحسين الهضم والتحكم في الشهية.. ما أفضل وقت لتناول التمر؟

خبراء يكشفون تأثير الاستحمام في الظلام على جودة النوم !

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

إزالة ثاني أكسيد الكربون من الغلاف الجوي.. ما دور المحيطات والبحار؟

نظائر الهيليوم مقياس لاكتشاف رواسب الذهب.. كيف ذلك؟

الصين تطلق أول ناقلة نفط خام ذكية في العالم تعمل بالميثانول

الزمن على المريخ أسرع من الأرض.. دراسة علمية تكشف الفوارق

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Semantic roles and Grammatical Relations Conclusion

Arguments and semantic roles

Semantic roles and Grammatical Relations

Constituency

Identifying meaningful elements Summary

Identifying meaningful elements within words

Identifying meaningful elements Identifying word meanings

Consequences of modifying Gunlogsons 2001 model

A case study of the semantics of clear - Factivity revisited

A case study of the semantics of clear - The analysis

A case study of the semantics of clear - Vagueness

Adjective/adverb semantics and verb semantics