Mass noun

Not to be confused with Collective noun.

Template:ExamplesSidebar In linguistics, a mass noun (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) is a common noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass. Given that different languages have different grammatical resources, 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 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 sort of that entity" – for example, "Many cleaning agents today are technically not soaps, but detergents."

Sometimes a noun has both a mass sense 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 mass nouns, and for nouns referring to objects or people to be count nouns. 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. Similarly, thirty cows may also be called cattle.

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, German 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"].

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.

Cumulativity and mass nouns

An expression P has cumulative reference 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):

$\forall X\subseteq U_{p}[CUM_{p}(X)\Leftrightarrow \exists x,y[X(x)\,\wedge \,X(y)\,\wedge \,\neg x=y]\;\wedge \;\forall x,y[X(x)\,\wedge \,X(y)\Rightarrow X(x\,\oplus \,y)]]$

which may be read as: X is cumulative iff there exists x,y with the property X (and x distinct from y) such that for all x and y, if x,y have the property X, then 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.) The distinction between nouns that have cumulative reference and those that do not can be seen to correspond to the one between mass and count nouns.

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.

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. Such examples indicate that the best characterization of mass nouns is that they are cumulative nouns. 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.

Multiple senses for one noun

Many English count nouns can be used as mass nouns, and in these cases, they take on cumulative reference. 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, "fire" is generally a mass noun, but "a fire" refers to a discrete entity, and does not satisfy the criterion for cumulative reference. Two common situations of this process are when speaking of either servings/measurements 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". Some mass nouns can't easily be countified, and some count nouns are hard to massify. For example the count noun "house" is difficult to use as mass, and the mass noun "cutlery" is hard to countify:

• 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)

In some languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, all nouns are effectively mass nouns, requiring a measure word to be quantified.

Quantification

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).

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 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. This criticism dates back to at least 1770; the usage dates back to Old English. In 2008, Tesco changed supermarket checkout 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 Campaign. 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 nouns. 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 "mathematics" and "physics", have developed true mass-noun senses despite having grown from count-noun roots.

See also

• Count noun
• Measure word
• Plurale tantum

External links

• The Mavens Word of the Day: less/fewer
• Semantic Archives: Mass nouns, count nouns and non-count nouns
• F.J. Pelletier L.K. Schubert (2001) Mass Expressions in D. Gabbay & F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 10
• D. Nicolas (2008) Mass nouns and plural logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 31.2, pp.211-244