English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
A2.6 Count and noncount nouns
A2 Nouns
Section A. Introduction
The second important distinction is between count and noncount nouns. A large number of nouns in English cannot have a plural or be preceded by a, for example: advice, air, fun, luck, milk, weather
You cannot say, for example, ’an advice’ or ’two advices’, ’a luck’ or ’two lucks’. Nouns which can have a plural or a singular with a are called count nouns; they constitute the majority of nouns.
To some extent the grammar here follows logic. Nouns referring to things that are easily divisible into units are count; those that are conceived as a mass are noncount;
thus water is noncount while river and lake are count. There is also a tendency for count nouns to refer to concrete things (which we can see or feel), and noncount nouns to be abstract, but there are exceptions:
abstract count nouns: idea, statement, thought, description
concrete noncount nouns: bread, butter, milk, money, sugar
And some nouns are unexpectedly noncount, for example advice and information. This even applies to concrete nouns such as furniture; there is no plural ’furnitures’ (see D2). Where it is necessary to count such noncount nouns, counting expressions can be used, for example, a piece of advice, a loaf of bread, two items of furniture.
Activity A2.6
Work out whether these nouns are count or noncount: accident, dream, equipment, homework, ice, journey, programme, progress, travel
There are many nouns in English which can be both count and noncount. Section C2 deals with this.
Variation in english
In some varieties of English, certain nouns have a different count status. For example, staff can be a count noun so it is possible to say ’a staff’, whereas in standard English you would say ’a member of staff’.
Terminology
Why do we say (in scientific grammar) ’count’ and ’noncount’ rather than ’countable’ and ’uncountable’? To illustrate this let’s consider a riddle:
’What can be counted but also cannot be counted?’ (a)
The answer is: ’money’. How is this possible? Well, in the general sense it is of course possible to count money. You can flick through a wad of notes saying ’10 dollars, 20 dollars, 30 dollars’, etc. But in the linguistic or grammatical sense it is not possible; you cannot say ’one money, two moneys’ etc. The apparent paradox can be rephrased in this way:
’You can count money but you can’t count money.’ (b)
By using italics (or some other convention) to indicate a linguistic or lexical item we can make things clearer:
’You can count money but you can’t count money.’ (c)
But this would not be obvious in speech. And we need to realise that the two uses of the verb ’count’ are very different. One has the ordinary, lexical meaning; the other has a technical meaning, in the sense of being able to make a word plural and/or put numbers and the indefinite article in front. If we now use an adjective instead of the verb we get:
’Money is countable but money is uncountable.’ (d)
Now while this might be an acceptable statement in pedagogic grammar, we need to go one stage further to distinguish the two uses, and for this purpose we use special terms, ’count’ and ’noncount’, for the technical, grammatical meaning, while leaving ’countable’ and ’uncountable’ for normal use. Thus
’Money is countable but money is noncount.’ (e)
Many terms are like this; when you are studying grammar (rather than learning about it in a language class) you need terms that are precise in meaning and distinctive in form.
Comments
Activity A2.1: there are seven: noun, word, class, day, example, chocoholic, text. If the repetitions are included, then 13 of the 44 words in the paragraph are nouns.
Activity A2.2: there are four which fit the definition: bomb, carpet, teacher, tree.
Activity A2.3: even though you do not know the meaning of glob in each case, you probably worked out that it is a noun in 1, 2 and 3. In 1 the evidence is that it has two in front and has an -s added (for plural) - points a) and b); in 2 the clue comes from the fact that is in the company of two other nouns, embarrassment and anger - point b). In 3 it is preceded by a, a determiner - point b). In 4 you probably realised that it is a verb, while in 5 it is not so easy to determine; it could be a noun or adjective, but none of the three tests works for it. So even the formal definition is not perfect.
Activity A2.4: all of these words exist in the singular but with different meanings that do not make sense here, or are unidiomatic.
Activity A2.5: as you can see, the genitive marks all sorts of relationships between two nouns, usually involving people. In 1 and 2 there is an underlying verbal relationship, where the genitive marks the object of an underlying verb (’someone defeated Federer’) or the subject (’the man died’); or a personal relationship (3 and 4); or an associated feature or attribute (5 and 6).
Activity A2.6: accident, dream, journey and programme are count; the others are noncount. Note the difference between journey and travel, though they both refer to basically the same idea. There are other pairs of words like this, for example a difficulty and trouble.