7.7 Countability

A fundamental aspect of nominal meaning is whether the entity is countable or not. Descriptively, nouns that are countable can be pluralized, can appear with numerals, and take the determiner many. All of the nouns (bolded) in (1)-(3) are called count nouns in English because they have these properties.

There is another class of nouns which cannot be pluralized in English, like dirt. Nouns like dirt are called mass nouns. They often point to substances or entities that are otherwise considered to be a homogenous group. For example, rice is also a mass noun in English. In principle individual grains of rice can be counted, but linguistically rice behaves like a mass noun. Mass nouns resist pluralization, cannot take numerals, and takes the determiner much rather than many. This is shown in (4)-(6).

Conceptually, count nouns are countable in the sense that, for example, if I have one cup on the table and then put another cup on the table, this results in two distinct, separate cup entities where the boundary of each one is perceptible. We say that count nouns are bounded for this reason. Mass nouns like dirt is different because if I have a pile of dirt on the table and add more dirt to it, you still have just one pile of dirt, just larger. So mass nouns are unbounded.

You may have noticed that in (4)-(6), pluralised mass nouns sound acceptable in certain contexts. For example, saying a lot of dirts, three muds, or many rices gives rise to the kind interpretation: a lot of kinds of dirt, three kinds of mud, and many kinds of rice. Like this, mass nouns can often be used in a “count” way.

Besides counting the kinds of the mass noun, another way to make mass nouns countable is to put them into containers. For example, nouns like water and pudding are homogenous substances and therefore are fundamentally a mass noun, but when pluralised they have a fairly natural interpretation in which you are counting the number of containers that contain the substance. This is shown in (7)-(8).

The reverse is possible as well: in some contexts, fundamentally count nouns can be used in “mass” ways. Pumpkin for example is at the basic level a count noun, but if for example a truck carrying a bunch of pumpkins crashed on the highway and the pumpkins got smashed and got everywhere on the road, you can use it in a “mass” way. This is shown in (9)-(10).

What we learn from these observations is that nouns lexically encode whether it is a count noun or a mass noun in its lexical entry. However, there also seems to be a rule in English where a mass noun can be converted into a count noun, and vice versa.

Whether a noun is linguistically count or mass varies from language to language. Consider (11) and (12). For example in Halkomelem (Hul’qumi’num), an indigenous language spoken by various First Nations peoples of the British Columbia Coast, fog can be readily pluralized, giving rise to the meaning ‘lots of fog’. In French, singular cheveu is interpreted as ‘a strand of hair,’ while cheveux, which is morphosyntactically marked plural, is interpreted as ‘a mass of hair,’ as in the hair on your head.

It is also worthwhile to note that some languages like Japanese do not have productive morphosyntactic plural marking. For example, (13) can be interpreted as ‘bring cups’ or ‘bring a cup’ depending on context.

Some linguists have analysed languages like Japanese as having only mass nouns (Chierchia 1998). This does not mean that you cannot count things ever in Japanese. Japanese has a rich system of noun classifiers. Similar to the way in English hair is counted as ‘one strand of hair,’ ‘two strands of hair,’ etc., Japanese has morphemes that attach to numerals to turn mass nouns into bounded bits. Which morpheme is used depends on the semantic classification of the noun being counted. Consider the data in (14).

The bolded morpheme (glossed as “CL” for “Classifier”) is the classifier in each sentence. The idea is that literally saying something like ‘2 pencils’ (*2 enpitsu or *enpitsu 2) is ungrammatical in Japanese. You must use a classifier when counting things. Nouns in Japanese are categorised into grammatical groups that are roughly semantically-based. For example, “thin, flat objects” forms a category, whose typical member include objects like paper, posters, and pizza. Nouns in this class use the classifier -mai as in (14a). The classifier -hon in (14b) is typically used for long, thin, often cylindrical objects like pencils, pens, and drinking straws. -dai in (14c) is used for typically mechanical objects with perceptible parts (e.g., cars, trucks, and computers), -hiki in (14d) for smaller quadripedal mammals (e.g., dogs, cats, hamsters), and -wa in (14e) for animals with wings (e.g., chicken, sparrow, eagle). -tsu and -ko are the “elsewhere” classifiers that can be used for a more heterogenous group of inanimate nouns that don’t fall into a specific class (e.g., tomatoes, pebbles, cushions, etc.). Some members of a noun class can be surprising: for example, usagi ‘rabbit’ takes the classifier typically  used for animals with wings (-wa), likely because their ears are perceived to be like wings. ke:ki ‘cake’, if whole, takes the classifier -dai for “mechanical objects with perceptible parts” and if by the slice, the classifier -kire for “slices” or –pi:su for “pieces”. 

Check your understanding

References

Chierchia, G. (1998). Reference to kinds across language. Natural language semantics, 6(4), 339-405.

Wiltschko, M. (2008). The syntax of non-inflectional plural marking. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 26(3), 639-694.