In
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, a
mass noun (also
uncountable noun or
non-count noun) is a
nounIn linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
that refers to some entity as an undifferentiated unit rather than as something with discrete subsets. Non-count nouns are best identified by their syntactic properties, and especially in contrast with count nouns. The semantics of mass nouns are highly controversial. Given that different languages have different grammatical features, the actual test for which nouns are mass nouns may vary between languages. In English, mass nouns are characterized by the fact that they cannot be directly modified by a
numeralIn linguistics, number names are specific words in a natural language that represent numbers.In writing, numerals are symbols also representing numbers...
without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article (
a or
an). Thus, the mass noun "water" is quantified as "20 liters of water" while the count noun "chair" is quantified as "20 chairs". However, mass nouns (like count nouns) can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e.g., "much water," "many chairs").
Some mass nouns can be used in English in the plural to mean "more than one instance (or example) of a certain sort of entity"—for example, "
Many cleaning agents today are technically not soaps, but detergents." In such cases they no longer play the role of mass nouns, but (syntactically) they are treated as
count nounIn linguistics, a count noun is a common noun that can be modified by a numeral and that occurs in both singular and plural form, as well as co-occurring with quantificational determiners like every, each, several, etc. A mass noun has none of these properties...
s.
Some nouns have both a mass
senseIn linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word.For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word , each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence...
and a count sense (for example,
paper).
Relating grammatical number to 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 nounIn linguistics, a count noun is a common noun that can be modified by a numeral and that occurs in both singular and plural form, as well as co-occurring with quantificational determiners like every, each, several, etc. A mass noun has none of these properties...
s. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, however; such mass nouns as
furniture and
cutlery, which represent more easily quantified objects, show that the mass/count distinction should be thought of as a property of the terms themselves, rather than as a property of their referents. For example, the same set of chairs can be referred to as "seven chairs" and as "furniture"; though both
chair and
furniture are referring to the same thing, the former is a count noun and the latter a mass noun.
For another illustration of the principle that the count/non-count distinction lies not in an object but rather in the expression that refers to it, consider the English words "fruit" and "vegetables". The objects that these words describe are, objectively speaking, similar (that is, they're all edible plant parts); yet the word "fruit" is (usually) non-count, whereas "vegetables" is a plural count form. One can see that the difference is in the language, not in the reality of the objects. Meanwhile,
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
has a general word for "vegetables" that, like English "fruit", is (usually) non-count:
das Gemüse. British English has a slang word for "vegetables" that acts the same way: "veg" [rhymes with "edge"].
In languages that have a
partitive caseThe partitive case 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 numbers....
, the distinction is explicit and mandatory. For example, in
FinnishFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
,
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 caseThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
instead, assumes that there was a specific countable portion of water that was completely drunk.
The work of logicians like
Godehard LinkGodehard Link is a professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Munich.-External links:*...
and
Manfred KrifkaManfred Krifka is director of the Center for General Linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and editor of the academic journal Theoretical Linguistics.- Bibliography :...
established that the mass/count distinction can be given a precise, mathematical definition in terms of
quantizationIn linguistics, a quantized expression is such that, whenever it is true of some entity, it is not true of any proper subparts of that entity. Example: If something is an "apple", then no proper subpart of that thing is an "apple". If something is "water", then many of its subparts will also be...
and
cumulativityIn 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 entities can be said to be "water", then combining them into one entity...
.
Cumulativity and mass nouns
An expression
P has
cumulative referenceIn 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 entities can be said to be "water", then combining them into one entity...
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.
An expression
P has
quantized referenceIn linguistics, a quantized expression is such that, whenever it is true of some entity, it is not true of any proper subparts of that entity. Example: If something is an "apple", then no proper subpart of that thing is an "apple". If something is "water", then many of its subparts will also be...
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 nouns 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
nounIn linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s can be used in either mass or count syntax, and in these case, 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. Conversely, "
fireFire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....
" is frequently used as a mass noun, but "a fire" refers to a discrete entity. Interestingly, "fire" as a count noun does allow cumulative reference, since if two fires join in a forest, they are referred to as one fire. 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:
- Bad: *There is house on the road. (Bad even if the situation of war is considered)
- Bad: *There is a cutlery on the table. (Bad even if just one fork is on the table)
- Good: You get a lot of house for your money since the recession.
- Good: Spanish cutlery is my favorite. (type / kind reading)
In some languages, such as Chinese and
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, it has been claimed by some that all nouns are effectively mass nouns, requiring a
measure wordIn linguistics, measure words are words that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of some noun. They denote a unit or measurement and are used with nouns that are not countable. For instance, in English, is a mass noun and thus one cannot say *"three muds", but one can say...
to be quantified.
Quantification
Some
quantifiersQuantification has several distinct senses. In mathematics and empirical science, it is the act of counting and measuring that maps human sense observations and experiences into members of some set of numbers. Quantification in this sense is fundamental to the scientific method.In logic,...
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).
The 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
comparativeIn grammar, the comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person, thing, or other entity has a property or quality greater or less in extent than that of another, and is used in this context with a subordinating conjunction, such as than,...
and
superlativeIn grammar, the superlative is the form of an adjective that indicates that the person or thing modified has the quality of the adjective to a degree greater than that of anything it is being compared to in a given context. English superlatives are typically formed with the suffix -est In...
of both
much and
many,
few and
little have differing comparative and superlative (
fewer,
fewest and
less,
least). However,
suppletiveIn 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 "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies...
use of
less and
least with count nouns is common in many contexts, some of which attract criticism as
nonstandardA nonstandard dialect is a dialect that does not have the institutional support or sanction that a standardized dialect has.Like any dialect, a nonstandard dialect has its own vocabulary and an internally consistent grammar and syntax; and it may be spoken using a variety of accents. Describing a...
or low-prestige. This criticism dates back to at least 1770; the usage dates back to Old English. In 2008,
TescoTesco plc is a global grocery and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Cheshunt, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest retailer in the world measured by revenues and the second-largest measured by profits...
changed supermarket
checkoutCheckout can have the following meanings:*a point of sale terminal*in information management, it means blocking a file for editing; see Revision control*Checkout , a comedy...
signs reading "Ten items or less" after complaints that it was bad grammar; it switched to "Up to ten items" rather than "Ten items or fewer" at the suggestion of the
Plain English CampaignThe Plain English Campaign is a commercial editing and training firm based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1979 by Chrissie Maher, the company positions itself as a leader in plain-language advocacy, working to persuade organisations in the UK and abroad to communicate with the public in plain...
. It is less common to favour "At fewest ten items" over "At least ten items".
Confounding of collective noun and mass noun
There is often confusion about the two different concepts of
collective noun and
mass noun. Generally, collective nouns are not mass nouns, but rather are a special subset of
count nounIn linguistics, a count noun is a common noun that can be modified by a numeral and that occurs in both singular and plural form, as well as co-occurring with quantificational determiners like every, each, several, etc. A mass noun has none of these properties...
s. However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries), because users confound 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 "
mathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
" and "
physicsPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
", have developed true mass-noun senses despite having grown from count-noun roots.
External links