Mass effect

[undyingking]

One of the things I love about English is the quirks of its structure which native speakers aren't consciously aware of, but which bedevil learners. An example is the way it handles mass and count nouns. Maybe you got taught this sort of thing at school, but I never did: so here it is now, some actually useful grammar.

A count noun is the usual

Comments

[bateleur]

I'm not entirely convinced by "faux mass noun" as a label. It's true that "lots of sheep" doesn't tell you whether it's a count or a mass noun, but then "lots of X" suffers from the same ambiguity for all X unless you can identify X as singular or plural in isolation. Given more sentences with "sheep" in you'll eventually find one which can't be a mass noun, at which point there's no longer any confusion.

Fish is confusing, but from my perspective that's mostly because fish is both a count and a mass noun.

[undyingking]

Mm, you're right of course. I was thinking that for a learner of English, the time during which sufficient 'sheep' examples can be accumulated to be confident of the usage may be appreciable.

It's well known that 'sheeps' and other such incorrect regularizations (eg. 'foots') are common errors in children developing native English use. I wonder if, among foreign English learners, the 'sheeps' confusion of mass and count noun is commoner than the 'foots' type of error.

[bateleur]

I love that kind of kid-speak!

No idea about the foreigners question, since I've seen very few at the learning stage.

[pmcray]

"There is no such word as 'cements'."

One can write sentences such as "Hydraulic cements (e.g., Portland cement) harden because of hydration, a chemical reaction between the anhydrous cement powder and water." Is there grammatically a difference between "We will need two tonnes of cement for this job" and "We will need two different cements for this job"? We can certainly replace "cements" with "types of cement" or "sugars" with types of "sugar", but perhaps not "types of rain" with "rains". The classification of a noun as a mass noun is capturing something about the nature of the noun, but there's still context to be taken into account.

[undyingking]

'Rains' would be replaced with 'periods of rain' I guess. This (and 'cements' for 'kinds of cement') is a sort of synecdoche, it seems to me.

'Geometry' is an interesting example. Originally it was purely a mass noun, but once it was discovered that different geometries (ie. synecdochic for 'systems of geometry'?) were possible, the plural form became sufficiently familiar that now it makes more sense to think of it as commonly a count noun.

[pmcray]

Is there some kind of coomon mechanism of thought through which nouns that start as mass nouns become generalised through the synedoche process to count nouns?

"Rains" is an interesting example. "The rains started early that year." There are certainly different types of rain (intermittent light drizzle v. heavy persistent downpour), butt would a meteorologist talk of "rains" in the context of "types of rains"? However, a planetologist might, I suppose, contrast water rain on Earth with hydrocarbon rain on Titan, thus opening up the use of "rains" in the synedoche sense.

[undyingking]

It wouldn't surprise me if one could conceive of at least one arcane synecdochic context along these lines for every mass noun. Then I suppose it's just a question of how mainstream that usage gets to eventually become.

[venta]

I remember onebyone once expressing the theory that anything which you could hunt could be used as a mass noun (deer, duck, elephant, etc). Most of these things behave like normal nouns in any other context (I feed ducks on the pond, but I went shooting duck at the weekend[*]). I suspect that's due to the way people who hunt (historically) phrased things, rather than any inherent capacity of the noun.

[*] I didn't do either of these things, by the way.

[undyingking]

Mm, I think that's right. I've heard this formation referred to as the 'snob plural', because people who use it do so to indicate that they have a rather more up-market relationship with these huntable items than ordinary people do.

Perhaps revealingly, the same sort of plural was often used for native peoples of colonized lands, eg. 'a band of Cheyenne' rather than 'a band of Cheyennes'.

[huggyrei]

Hang on, isn't it 'I own three fishes'?

I was in a school year where the then-government decided to switch maths and literacy years around in primary, then hanged their mind and switched it bak the year after. As a result, we got two years of maths, but never actually learned all the grammar definitions and construction rules. By the time we went to senior school the teachers just assumed we knew and used words I'd never heard of. I only figured out what a noun or an adjective was once we started learning French. Before that, I just spoke and wrote English the way I'd been reading it, with no knowledge of rules apart from things I'd unconsciously grasped; thankfully I always read a lot of books.

[undyingking]

I did get taught some grammar at school, but most of it I've subsequently learned was wrong, so you might have had a lucky escape.

I actually think that it's better to learn by mimicking usage, rather than by learning a bunch of rules which (in English at least) always turn out to have reams of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.

[undyingking]

'Three fishes' is generally considered as 'incorrect' in standard English, but it certainly is nonetheless used quite a bit.

See eg: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=three+fish%2Cthree+fishes&year_start=1980&year_end=2008&corpus=6&smoothing=3&share=&search_plus_one=form&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthree%20fish%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthree%20fishes%3B%2Cc0

[mr_malk]

Almost all English (countable) nouns can be legitimately pluralised by adding an s (or es), and I think that "fish" falls into that category, as does "cannon" - much to the annoyance of a friend of mine who insisted that I was wrong about this on one occasion. Some nouns (and "sheep" is a notable example) simply jar if you add an s to them.

I'm not the greatest champion of common usage dictating correctness, but in this case I tend to lean that way.

[watervole]

A lot of people get confused by the use of 'less' and 'fewer', but it fits right in with what you're writing about.

I have less cement than you, but fewer tables.

I have fewer sheep also.

Fish can be used both ways, and the context is very telling.

If I have a fishing boat with a full hold, you have less fish than I do, but if we keep pet fish, then you have fewer fish.

Clearly the distinction depends partly on whether it would be physically possible to count them.

[undyingking]

Mm, exactly.

It seems to me that 'less' is increasingly replacing 'fewer' in that usage: although plenty of people object to this, it seems likely that 'fewer' will fall into disuse and 'less' will end up covering both.

[mr_malk]

I wouldn't be too bold about that prediction. I don't know whether loose vs strict usage is growing or shrinking. According to David Crystal, people were bitching about that, along with disinterested vs uninterested back in Samuel Johnson's day. There are enough linguistic pedants out there to keep the home fires burning for "fewer" for some time yet.

All of which has reminded me of this XKCD strip. I particularly like the line about the Ghost of Subjunctive Past!

[undyingking]

heh! indeed.

I guess time will tell on less/fewer. The 'recency illusion' and related phenomena suggest that you're right about it being a sluggish process at best!