For a long time, the description given to nouns has always been insufficient, calling for more analysis on what constitutes them and how they are applied in different situations. In elementary and high school levels, nouns are described as names that refer to persons, places, and objects and verbs as actions words. Individuals with deep knowledge in linguistics have established the inefficiency of this description since it fails to establish the singularity and plurality of the words when talking about the degree to which they can be counted. Two ways have always been used to describe nouns, that is, countable and uncountable. However, this is not the best and most inclusive approach since the degree to which they are countable depends on the situation. Looking at their morphosyntactic properties like how they can be used in sentences and the suffixes they can be attached to could help in the effective description of the nouns and the degree to which they can be counted.
Ontological and Semantic Categorization of Nouns
Concrete and Abstract Nouns
Nouns can either be concrete or abstract. This semantic category leaves a question of whether each type could be written in singular and plural, or whether they can be the prefix. The concrete nouns can be touched and or moved from one place to another. This category comprises objects nous like people, books, utensils or anything tangible (Sutton & Filip, 2020: 324). On the contrary, abstract nouns are words that denote a state, quality or state of things that can neither be seen nor touched (Murphy, 2010: 150). They are thus nouns that can be felt but not touched. For instance, love, beauty and time. Important to note is that concreate nouns can be counted since one object could be differentiated from the other. On the contrary, abstract nouns cannot be counted even though their utilization in sentences could be in plural formats (Akhtiamov, 2019: 220). For instance, one could state “much love” to imply the plurality of the affection expressed towards someone. In addition, air is an abstract noun that cannot be counted. However, someone could state “much air” to imply a form of pluralism. Therefore, abstract words are not countable but do not display all the grammatical properties associated with uncountable nouns.
Common and Proper Nouns
Common and proper nouns is another category for nouns. In most cases, such nouns are treated as grammatically distinct subclasses. The use of a common noun about a particular token of its type requires the writer to make them part of the noun phrase accompanied with a determiner (Breban & Kolkmann, 2019: 751). For instance, the man and man are two different noun. When article the or a is written before the noun of focus, that noun becomes common Articles a and the are used to imply that this aspect is familiar, has been seen before and that one has interacted with it. On the contrary, referring to someone as just man implies that the person of attention is not familiar and has not been seen before (Vartiainen, 2019: 905). He then becomes a proper noun. The man can be written in the plural as the men while man can be written as men. Therefore, both common and proper nouns can be counted since their formats allow plural semantics.
Counting of Nouns
Count and non-Count Nouns
Nouns, as stated above, refer to objects that can be seen and touched and states that are abstract. There is also the category of nouns which denotes their ability to be counted. In English and other languages, there are words denoting stuff that can neither be counted nor individuated and those that can be individualized and counted (Murphy, 2010: 150). For instance, books are count nouns since one can count their number on a shelf or a lock. On the other hand, soil can be used to refer to non-count nouns, which cannot be counted in individual forms. Count nouns are therefore pluralized and preceded by numerals. For example, one could say that she owns 50 books in her home library. Fifty, in this case, denotes a number, confirming that the books have been counted and assigned a numerical value. On the other hand, non-count nouns like soil are traditionally referred to as mass nouns and are not assigned numerals, but rather non-counting quantifiers like much, that is used to inform their quantity (Schneider, Hundt & Schreier, 2020: 510). Counting the non-count nouns denoted by mass quantity requires individuals to establish the units into which such stuff can be divided, such as tins. For instance, someone could state that the builders carried 50 clumps of soil to the construction site. Thus, the mass or non-count nouns could be counted when placed in their respective units of measurement.
The Semantics of Countability
As noted above, there are different subclasses of count and non-count nouns. The analysis has established that count nouns are denoted as individual objects or persons while the non-count nouns come in mass quantities that cannot be individuated (Murphy, 2010: 152). The countable nouns, in sematic terms, are bounded while mass nouns remain unbounded. An object or entity is bounded when it is indivisible, that is, it cannot retain its shape or feature when divided. For instance, a person is a bounded noun. Dividing the person would mean cutting the component parts that constitute the individual. Such parts after being cut from the original piece would not retain the shape and features of the person before the division.
On the contrary, the unbounded nouns retain their shape and feature even after division. For instance, dividing one clump of soil into 3 tins would imply that each tin would get a share of the soil. Even though the quantity would change, the properties and features of the soil would be retained and established in each tin. Even though the singular count nouns are bonded, their plural versions are not (Grimm, Moon & Richman, 2021: 74). For instance, one person is bounded since his or her division would change the shape and features. However, when a singular person is changed to plural by adding more people, they change from bounded to unbounded, since they can be divided while retaining their feature. For instance, a group of three people can be divided into three to get three separate individuals with their features retained. Therefore, count nouns can be bounded in their single forms and unbounded in plurals sematic.
Mass Nouns as Plurals
The above analysis shows that mass nouns are singular since they are individualized. However, there are several cases in which the mass nouns are plural, meaning that their component parts can be individualized. This technique of counting mass nouns is known as Chierchia’s approach. The analysis of the literature above has established that individuals, representing count nouns and substances, denoting the mass nouns are the two extremes of noun countability (Murphy, 2010: 160). However, Chierchia noted that some of the mass nouns can be individualized when separated from the group in which they are placed. For instance, furniture is a mass noun that is written in a singular form. However, the term is a mass noun that’s consists of several objects like chairs, tables and beds. Also, clothing is made up of dresses, skirts, shirts and trousers. Furniture and clothing are therefore mass nouns that cannot be written in the plural. However, Tsiakmakis, Borras-Comes and Espinal (2021: 212) note that the component parts of these nouns could be pluralized. For instance, there are the shirts, dresses, skirts and shirts in one category and chairs, tables and beds in the other. Therefore, even though the mass nouns are singular some contain individualized items which can be pluralized.
The Universal Packager of Nouns
There are situations when individuals make sense of the substance terms like mud as occurring in either plural or singular forms. Some would claim two muds to mean not one but several, even though the above discussion denotes mud as a mass noun that cannot be divided into individual units. In such cases, an individual would involve an operator, commonly known as universal packager to differentiate between singularity and plurality of the nouns (Murphy, 2010: 157). The packager is used to differentiate bounded and unbounded nouns. For instance, people would say they took a cup of tea to imply “one tea” when in actual sense, tea is a mass noun that cannot be counted unless clamped into tin units (Murphy, 2010: 157). When saying, the visitor drank a tea, it implies that the noun has been individualized. However, stating that visitors took tea to suggest that the noun, tea, is bounded. Therefore, the addition of universal packager, a, translates the mass nouns into individuals and unbounded nouns.
Wierzbicka’s Countability Argument
Nouns can be counted based on the degree to which they remain unbounded and separate from their mass formations. However, Wierzbicka argues that countability is semantically motivated since the practice departs from the personal view of the nouns under focus (Murphy, 2010: 163). For instance, oats and wheat are not grain particles. However, oats are bigger than wheat, making the latter to be referred to as countable nouns with the other being regarded as uncountable. In such situations, the countability is determined by the perception of the people, since anything bigger or in large units is perceived countable (Murphy, 2010: 163). The same applies to nouns like sugar, salt and floor. Their particles are too small making them hard to count. On the contrary, grains of maize and beans can be counted due to their large size. Therefore, nouns of items large enough are regarded as countable while those of small particulate matters are perceived as uncountable.
Conclusion
Nouns can be singular or pluralized depending on their morphosyntactic properties. There are several types of nouns. The first is abstract and concrete. The concrete nouns can be touched and seen while the abstract nouns can only be felt. In most cases, the abstract nouns come in mass forms and are therefore inseparable from their constituent parts. On the other hand, the concrete nouns can be counted, both as individuals and in a group. There are also common and proper nouns that refer to familiar and unfamiliar objects or states. When referring to countability, there are count and non-count nouns. The count nouns can be pluralized considering that they come in individual forms. On the other hand, the non-count nouns are insuperable from individual components and therefore referred to as mass nouns. Chierchia’s approach provides avenues for pluralizing the mass nouns since their separation into individual units makes them be counted. Therefore, linguistic learners and scholars need to establish the type of noun before finding out the degree to which they can be counted.
References
Akhtiamov R.B. (2019). Dictionary of abstract and concrete words of the Russian language: a methodology for creation and application. Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics, 10(6), 218-230. https://doi.org/10.22055/RALS.2019.14684
Breban, T., & Kolkmann, J. (2019). Different perspectives on proper noun modifiers. English Language & Linguistics, 23(4), 749-758. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431900025X
Grimm, S., Moon, E., & Richman, A. (2021). Strongly non-countable nouns: Strategies against individuality. Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond, 5, 69-81. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/51044/external_content.pdf?sequence=1#page=69
Murphy, M. L. (2010). Lexical meaning. Part III: Word classes and semantic types- Ontological categories and word classes. Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, G., Hundt, M., & Schreier, D. (2020). Pluralized non-count nouns across Englishes: A corpus-linguistic approach to variety types. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 16(3), 515-546. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2018-0068
Sutton, P. R., & Filip, H. (2020). Informational Object Nouns and the mass/count distinction. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 319-335. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2020.v24i2.900
Tsiakmakis, E., Borras-Comes, J., & Espinal, M. T. (2021). The interpretation of plural mass nouns in Greek. Journal of Pragmatics, 181, 209-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.05.017
Vartiainen, T. (2019). From twig-skinny to Kate Moss skinny: expressing degree with common and proper nouns. English Language & Linguistics, 23(4), 901-927. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674319000303
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|