An Overview of the Count/Noncount Distinction of English Nouns

Research on the count/noncount distinction of English nouns has a long history, but the distinction has never been sufficiently described.Count and noncount nouns are defined in two domains: morpho-syntax and semantics.The definition, however, varies from linguist to linguist.In this research, we take the view that the distinction is essentially syntactic, and count nouns are defined morpho-syntactically as those that satisfy two conditions: i) to inflect for number to mark a singularplural contrast and take both a singular and a plural verb that agree with the number of a subject NP (including those with identical singular and plural forms) ; ii) to occur in direct construction with the cardinal numerals.Noncount nouns are defined as those that do not satisfy these two conditions.Research on the count/noncount distinction has been mainly on concrete nouns.Various semantic criteria have been proposed (e.g.atomicity, homogeneity, arbitrary divisibility, boundedness) to identify referential properties that are to be shared by all count nouns or all noncount nouns.For proto-typical count and noncount nouns, a noun's semantic, syntactic and morphological properties are aligned, and the proposed criteria work very well.However, mismatches between countnoncount syntax and semantics are often observed: some nouns have the semantics of a count noun but the syntax of a noncount noun (e.g.furniture, toast) while others have the semantics of a noncount noun but the syntax of a count noun (e.g.cloud, mountain, ripple) .None of the proposed criteria sufficiently accounts for the mismatches.Conceptualization (or alternative construals) and communicative function are proposed to account for the mismatches.However, there are some nouns whose count or noncount status cannot be explained by alternative construals or communicative function.When all these criteria fail, grammatical convention remains as the only solution.Little research has been done on abstract nouns, and the proposed criteria for the count/noncount distinction of concrete nouns do not apply to abstract nouns because abstract nouns provide no perceptual information about their referential properties.Also, researchers use their own intuitions to provide examples to support their arguments.It is not hard to find counter-examples since their arguments are based on a very limited number of data.It is necessary to use large corpora such as the Bank of English to explore the count/noncount distinction of abstract nouns by looking into collocational patterns.