In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
with the
syntactic
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non-count nouns are distinguished from
count noun
In linguistics, a count noun (also countable noun) is a noun that can be modified by a quantity and that occurs in both singular and plural forms, and that can co-occur with quantificational determiners like ''every'', ''each'', ''several'', et ...
s.
Given that different
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
s have different
grammatical features, the actual test for which nouns are mass nouns may vary between languages. In
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
, mass nouns are characterized by the impossibility of being directly modified by a
numeral without specifying a
unit of measurement
A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude (mathematics), magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind can ...
and by the impossibility of being combined with an
indefinite article
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
(''a'' or ''an''). Thus, the mass noun "water" is quantified as "20 litres of water" while the count noun "chair" is quantified as "20 chairs". However, both mass and count nouns can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e.g., "so much water", "so many chairs").
Mass nouns have no concept of
singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular homology
* SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS)
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
and
plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...
, although in English they take singular
verb forms. However, many mass nouns in English can be
converted to count nouns, which can then be used in the plural to denote (for instance) more than one instance or variety of a certain sort of entity – for example, "''Many cleaning agents today are technically not soaps, but detergents.''"
Some nouns can be used indifferently as mass or count nouns, ''e.g.'', ''three cabbages'' or ''three heads of cabbage''; ''three ropes'' or ''three lengths of rope''. Some have different
sense
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of Stimulus (physiology), stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the cen ...
s as mass and count nouns: ''paper'' is a mass noun as a material (''three reams of paper'', ''one sheet of paper''), but a count noun as a unit of writing ("the students passed in their papers").
Grammatical number and physical discreteness
In English (and in many other languages), there is a tendency for nouns referring to liquids (''water'', ''juice''), powders (''sugar'', ''sand''), or substances (''metal'', ''wood'') to be used in mass syntax, and for nouns referring to objects or people to be count nouns. But there are many exceptions: the mass/count distinction is a property of the ''terms'', not their referents. For example, the same set of chairs can be referred to as "seven chairs" (count) and as "furniture" (mass); the Middle English mass noun ''pease'' has become the count noun ''pea'' by
morphological reanalysis
Folk etymology (also known as popular etymology, analogical reformation, reanalysis, morphological reanalysis or etymological reinterpretation) is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more famili ...
; "vegetables" are a plural count form, while the British English slang synonym "veg" is a mass noun.
In languages that have a
partitive case
The partitive case (abbreviated , , or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical case which denotes "partialness", "without result", or "without specific identity". It is also used in contexts where a subgroup is selected from a larger group, or with nu ...
, the distinction is explicit and mandatory. For example, in
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
, ''join vettä'', "I drank (some) water", the word ''vesi'', "water", is in the partitive case. The related sentence ''join veden'', "I drank (the) water", using the
accusative case
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
instead, assumes that there was a specific countable portion of water that was completely drunk.
The work of logicians like
Godehard Link
Godehard Link (born 7 July 1944 in Lippstadt) is a professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitä ...
and
Manfred Krifka
Manfred Krifka (born 26 April 1956 in Dachau) is a German linguist. He is the director of the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, ZAS) in Berlin, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, ...
established that the mass/count distinction can be given a precise, mathematical definition in terms of
quantization and
cumulativity
In linguistic semantics, an expression X is said to have cumulative reference if and only if the following holds: If X is true of both of ''a'' and ''b'', then it is also true of the combination of ''a'' and ''b''. Example: If two separate enti ...
.
Cumulativity and mass nouns
An expression ''P'' has
cumulative reference if and only if for any ''X'' and ''Y'':
*If ''X'' can be described as ''P'' and ''Y'' can be described as ''P'', as well, then the sum of ''X'' and ''Y'' can also be described as ''P''.
In more formal terms (Krifka 1998):
:
which may be read as: ''X'' is cumulative if there exists at least one pair'' x,y'', where ''x'' and ''y'' are distinct, and both have the property ''X'', and if for all possible pairs ''x'' and ''y'' fitting that description, ''X'' is a property of the sum of ''x'' and ''y''.
Consider, for example ''cutlery'': If one collection of cutlery is combined with another, we still have "cutlery." Similarly, if water is added to water, we still have "water." But if a chair is added to another, we don't have "a chair," but rather two chairs. Thus the nouns "cutlery" and "water" have cumulative reference, while the expression "a chair" does not. The expression "chairs", however, does, suggesting that the generalization is not actually specific to the mass-count distinction. As many have noted, it is possible to provide an alternative analysis, by which mass nouns and plural count nouns are assigned a similar semantics, as distinct from that of singular count nouns.
[Brendan S. Gillon (1992) Towards a common semantics for English count and mass nouns. Linguistics and Philosophy 15: 597–639]
An expression ''P'' has
quantized reference if and only if, for any X:
*If ''X'' can be described as ''P'', then no proper part of ''X'' can be described as ''P''.
This can be seen to hold in the case of the noun ''house'': no proper part of ''a house'', for example the bathroom, or the entrance door, is itself a house. Similarly, no proper part of ''a man'', say his index finger, or his knee, can be described as ''a man''. Hence, ''house'' and ''man'' have quantized reference. However, collections of ''cutlery'' do have proper parts that can themselves be described as ''cutlery''. Hence ''cutlery'' does not have quantized reference. Notice again that this is probably not a fact about mass-count syntax, but about prototypical examples, since many singular count nouns have referents whose proper parts can be described by the same term. Examples include divisible count nouns like "rope", "string", "stone", "tile", etc.
[
Some expressions are neither quantized nor cumulative. Examples of this include ]collective noun
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people (" ...
s like ''committee''. A committee may well contain a proper part which is itself a committee. Hence this expression isn't quantized. It isn't cumulative, either: the sum of two separate committees isn't necessarily a ''committee''. In terms of the mass/count distinction, ''committee'' behaves like a count noun. By some accounts, these examples are taken to indicate that the best characterization of mass nouns is that they are ''cumulative nouns''. On such accounts, count nouns should then be characterized as ''non-cumulative'' nouns: this characterization correctly groups ''committee'' together with the count nouns. If, instead, we had chosen to characterize count nouns as ''quantized nouns'', and mass nouns as ''non-quantized'' ones, then we would (incorrectly) be led to expect ''committee'' to be a mass noun. However, as noted above, such a characterization fails to explain many central phenomena of the mass-count distinction.
Multiple senses for one noun
Many English noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
s can be used in either mass or count syntax, and in these cases, they take on cumulative reference when used as mass nouns. For example, one may say that "there's ''apple'' in this sauce," and then ''apple'' has cumulative reference, and, hence, is used as a mass noun. The names of animals, such as "chicken", "fox" or "lamb" are count when referring to the animals themselves, but are mass when referring to their meat, fur, or other substances produced by them. (e.g., "I'm cooking chicken tonight" or "This coat is made of fox.") Conversely, "fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products.
At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition ...
" is frequently used as a mass noun, but "a fire" refers to a discrete entity. Substance terms like "water" which are frequently used as mass nouns, can be used as count nouns to denote arbitrary units of a substance ("Two ''waters'', please") or of several types/varieties ("''waters'' of the world"). One may say that mass nouns that are used as count nouns are " countified" and that count ones that are used as mass nouns are " massified". However, this may confuse syntax and semantics, by presupposing that words which denote substances are mass nouns by default. According to many accounts, nouns do not have a lexical specification for mass-count status, and instead are specified as such only when used in a sentence. Nouns differ in the extent to which they can be used flexibly, depending largely on their meanings and the context of use. For example, the count noun "house" is difficult to use as mass (though clearly possible), and the mass noun "cutlery" is most frequently used as mass, despite the fact that it denotes objects, and has count equivalents in other languages:
* Incorrect: *There is house on the road. (Incorrect even if a catastrophe is considered)
* Incorrect: *There is a cutlery on the table. (Incorrect even if just one fork is on the table)
* Correct: You got a lot of house for your money since the recession.
* Correct: Spanish cutlery is my favorite. (type / kind reading)
In some languages, such as Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
and Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, it has been claimed by some that all nouns are effectively mass nouns, requiring a measure word
In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun.
Description
Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns ...
to be quantified.
Quantification
Some quantifiers are specific to mass nouns (e.g., ''an amount of'') or count nouns (e.g., ''a number of'', ''every''). Others can be used with both types (e.g., ''a lot of'', ''some'').
Words ''fewer'' and ''less''
Where ''much'' and ''little'' qualify mass nouns, ''many'' and ''few'' have an analogous function for count nouns:
* How much damage? —Very little.
* How many mistakes? —Very few.
Whereas ''more'' and ''most'' are the comparative
In general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as wel ...
and superlative of both ''much'' and ''many'', ''few'' and ''little'' have differing comparative and superlative (''fewer'', ''fewest'' and ''less'', ''least''). However, suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...
use of ''less'' and ''least'' with count nouns is common in many contexts, some of which attract criticism as nonstandard or low-prestige
Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.)
Prestige may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Films
* ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnet ...
. This criticism dates back to at least 1770; the usage dates back to Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
. In 2008, Tesco
Tesco plc () is a British multinational groceries and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Welwyn Garden City, England. In 2011 it was the third-largest retailer in the world measured by gross revenues and the ninth-largest in th ...
changed supermarket checkout Checkout may refer to:
* a point of sale terminal
* Google Checkout, Google's online payment services
* Check-Out (The Price Is Right), a segment game from ''The Price Is Right''
* in information management, it means blocking a file for editing; ...
signs reading "Ten items or less" after complaints that it was bad grammar; at the suggestion of the Plain English Campaign
The Plain English Campaign (PEC) is a commercial editing and training firm based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1979 by Chrissie Maher, the company is a world leader in plain-language advocacy, working to persuade organisations in the UK and ...
it switched to "Up to ten items" rather than to "Ten items or fewer".
Conflation of collective noun and mass noun
There is often confusion about the two different concepts of ''collective noun
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people (" ...
'' and ''mass noun''. Generally, collective nouns such as ''group, family'', and ''committee'' are not mass nouns but are rather a special subset of count noun
In linguistics, a count noun (also countable noun) is a noun that can be modified by a quantity and that occurs in both singular and plural forms, and that can co-occur with quantificational determiners like ''every'', ''each'', ''several'', et ...
s. However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries) because users conflate two different kinds of verb number invariability: (a) that seen with mass nouns such as "water" or "furniture", with which only singular verb forms are used because the constituent matter is ''grammatically'' nondiscrete (although it may water"or may not furniture"be '' etically'' nondiscrete); and (b) that seen with collective nouns, which is the result of the metonymical shift between the group and its (both grammatically and etically) discrete constituents.
Some words, including "mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
" and "physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
", have developed true mass-noun senses despite having grown from count-noun roots.
See also
* Plurale tantum
A ''plurale tantum'' (Latin for "plural only"; ) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular fo ...
References
External links
The Mavens Word of the Day: less/fewer
Semantic Archives: Mass nouns, count nouns and non-count nouns
F.J. Pelletier L.K. Schubert (2001) Mass Expressions in D. Gabbay & F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 10
D. Nicolas (2008) Mass nouns and plural logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 31.2, pp. 211–244
Conceptual Categories and Linguistic Categories VIII: Nouns and Individuation
by Beth Levin at web.stanford.edu
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mass Noun
Nouns by type
Grammatical number
Syntax–semantics interface