| Grammatical features |
|---|
Syntax relationships |
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Inlinguistics, acount noun (alsocountable noun) is a noun that can be modified by aquantity and that occurs in bothsingular andplural forms, and that can co-occur with quantificationaldeterminers likeevery,each,several, etc. Amass noun has none of these properties: It cannot be modified by a number, cannot occur in plural, and cannot co-occur with quantificational determiners.
The concept of a "mass noun" is agrammatical concept and is not based on the innate nature of the object to which that noun refers. For example, "seven chairs" and "some furniture" could refer to exactly the same objects, with "seven chairs" referring to them as a collection of individual objects but with "some furniture" referring to them as a single undifferentiated unit, without reference to quantity. Because of this, the choice can serve asemantic purpose. However, some abstract phenomena like "fun" and "hope" have properties that are very difficult toquantify, and thus make it very difficult to refer to them with a count noun.
Below are examples of all the properties of count nouns holding for the count nounchair, but not for the mass nounfurniture.
| Correct | Incorrect |
|---|---|
| There isa chair in the room. | There ischair in the room. |
| There arechairs in the room. | There arefurnitures in the room. |
| There isfurniture in the room. | There isa furniture in the room. |
Some determiners can be used with both mass and count nouns, including "all", "no", and "some". Others cannot: "few", "many", "those", and numbers ("one") are used with count nouns; "little" and "much" with mass nouns. According to a controversial prescription, "fewer" and "fewest" is reserved for count nouns and "less" and "least" for mass nouns (seeFewer vs. less), but "less" has always been commonly used for count nouns. Despite this, "more" is uncontroversially the proper comparative for both "many" and "much". This criticism only dates back to 1770, but the criticized usage dates back toOld English.[1]
| Correct | Incorrect |
|---|---|
| Every chair is man-made. | Every furniture is man-made. |
| There areseveral chairs in the room. | There areseveral furnitures in the room. |
Classifiers are sometimes used as count nouns preceding mass nouns, in order to redirect the speaker's focus away from the mass nature. For example, "There's somefurniture in the room" can be restated, with a change of focus, to "There are somepieces offurniture in the room"; and "let's have somefun" can be refocused as "Let's have abit offun". In English, some nouns are used frequently as both count nouns (with or without a classifier) and mass nouns. For example:
LogiciansGodehard Link and linguists likeManfred Krifka investigated the mass noun and count noun distinction and found that it can be given a precise mathematical definition in terms of notions likecumulativity andquantization. Discussed by Barry Schein in 1993, a new logical framework, called plural logic, has also been used for characterizing the semantics of count nouns and mass nouns.[2]
Some languages, such asMandarin Chinese, treat all nouns as mass nouns, and need to make use of anoun classifier (seeChinese classifier) to addnumerals and otherquantifiers. The following examples are of nouns which, while seemingly innately countable, are still treated as mass nouns:
A classifier, therefore, implies that the object(s) referred to are countable in the sense that the speaker intends them to be enumerated, rather than considered as a unit (regardless of quantity). Notice that the classifier changes as the unit being counted changes.
Words such as "milk" or "rice" are not so obviously countable entities, but they can be counted with an appropriate unit of measure in both English and Mandarin (e.g., "glasses of milk" or "spoonfuls of rice").
The use of a classifier is similar to, but not identical with, the use ofunits of measurement to countgroups of objects in English. For example, in "three shelves of books", where "shelves" is used as a unit of measurement.
On the other hand, some languages, likeTurkish, treat all the nouns (even things which are not obviously countable) as countable nouns.
Even then, it is possible to use units of measures with numbers in Turkish, even with the very obviously countable nouns. The Turkish nouns can not take a plural suffix after the numbers and the units of measure.