Mass noun

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Not to be confused with Collective noun.

Grammatical features

Related to nouns

 Animacy
 Case
o Dative construction
o Dative shift
o Quirky subject
 Classifier
 Construct state
 Countability
o Count noun
o Mass noun
o Collective noun
 Definiteness
 Gender
 Genitive construction
o Possession
o Suffixaufnahme (case stacking)
 Noun class
 Number
o Singular
o Plural
o Dual
o Trial, etc.
o Singulative-Collective-Plurative
 Specificity
 Universal grinder

Related to verbs

 Associated motion
  Clusivity
 Conjugation
 Evidentiality
 Modality
 Person
 Telicity
 Tense–aspect–mood
o Grammatical aspect
o Lexical aspect (Aktionsart)
o Mood
o Tense
 Voice

General features

 Affect
 Boundedness
 Comparison (degree)
 Pluractionality (verbal number)
 Honorifics (politeness)
 Polarity
 Reciprocity
o Reflexive pronoun
o Reflexive verb

Syntax relationships

 Argument
o Transitivity
o Valency
 Branching
 Serial verb construction
 Traditional grammar
o Predicate
o Subject
o Object
o Adjunct
o Predicative
Semantics

 Contrast
 Mirativity
 Thematic relation
o Agent
o Patient
 Topic and Comment
o Focus
 Volition
 Veridicality

Phenomena

 Agreement
o Polypersonal agreement
 Declension
 Empty category
 Incorporation
 Inflection
 Markedness

v
t
e

Examples

advice

blood

criticism

equipment

evidence

furniture
foliage

garbage

homework

housework

information

knowledge

luggage

mathematics

money

music

pollution

progress

software

traffic

transportation

trash

In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, or non-count noun is a noun with the syntactic
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 nouns.

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 numeral 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 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 and plural, 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 senses 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").

Contents
 1Grammatical number and physical discreteness
 2Cumulativity and mass nouns
 3Multiple senses for one noun
 4Quantification
o 4.1Words fewer and less
 5Conflation of collective noun and mass noun
 6See also
 7References
 8External links

Grammatical number and physical discreteness[edit]

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;
"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 distinction is explicit and mandatory. For example,
in Finnish, 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 instead, assumes
that there was a specific countable portion of water that was completely drunk.

The work of logicians like Godehard Link and Manfred Krifka established that the mass/count
distinction can be given a precise, mathematical definition in terms of quantization and
cumulativity.[citation needed]

Cumulativity and mass nouns[edit]

An expression P has cumulative reference if and only if[1][2] 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):

{\displaystyle \forall X\subseteq U_{p}[\mathrm {CUM} _{p}(X)\Leftrightarrow \exists

x,y[X(x)\,\wedge \,X(y)\,\wedge \,\neg (x=y)]\;\wedge \;\forall x,y[X(x)\,\wedge
\,X(y)\Rightarrow X(x\,\oplus \,y)]]}

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.[3]

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.[4]

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.[4]

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[edit]

Examples

air

art

fish

food

grass

meat

milk

notation

paper

sand

soap

sugar

travel

water

Many English nouns 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" 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").[5] 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.[6] 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 and Japanese, it has been claimed by some that all nouns
are effectively mass nouns, requiring a measure word to be quantified.[7]

Quantification[edit]
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[edit]

Main article: Fewer versus 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 and superlative of both much and many, few and
little have differing comparative and superlative (fewer, fewest and less, least). However,
suppletive use of less and least with count nouns is common in many contexts, some of which
attract criticism as nonstandard or low-prestige.[8] This criticism dates back to at least 1770;
the usage dates back to Old English.[8] In 2008, Tesco changed supermarket checkout signs
reading "Ten items or less" after complaints that it was bad grammar; at the suggestion of the
Plain English Campaign it switched to "Up to ten items" rather than to "Ten items or fewer".[9]

Conflation of collective noun and mass noun[edit]

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 nouns.
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" and "physics", have developed true mass-noun senses
despite having grown from count-noun roots.