What makes some countable and some uncountable?

[seagal12]

I'm really confused with countable and uncountable nouns.
I saw the definition about them and it said "Countable nouns have regular forms or sizes and you can use them with "s" at the end." Uncountable nouns don't have regular forms or sizes and you can't use them as plural."

That's ok. But how do you know if you can use a word with "s" or not. Some of my students say "I have a few breads." or "I have a few candys." They don't know that bread and candy can't be used with "s". I just told them that they are considered as uncountable and that's a rule. But I want to know the exact reason(s). I think it's just too easy to say that it's just a rule.
Why are bread, candy, soap...uncountable? Can anybody explain that to me? Bread is uncountable but donuts or cakes are countable. Why?

[dduck]

The first one first: bread. If you walk into a bakers or a market you'll probably see lots of bread. You can describe all the bread in the store as bread, i.e. it's a collective noun. If you want to buy some bread you can get it by the loaf, A loaf is a countable noun, so you can buy one, two, or more loaves.

The second word: Candy. This is American English, and I could well be wrong here - I'm not a Yankee Candy can be countable and uncountable. You can walk into a store full of candy (in Britain you'd walk into a sweetie shop) and buy some candies, some candy bars, or lots of candy. See my description below.

Soap: you can buy bars of soap by asking "I'd like a bar of soap" but asking for "a soap" would sound very strange.

The way I describe uncountables is: if you would normally only use part of the whole, and you have to measure it when you buy it then it's uncountable. For examples, peanuts are uncountable, "I want 40 grammes of peanuts, please". However, if you buy them in a pre-packaged bag, then the bag (and the peanuts inside) become countable, e.g. "I want two bags of peanuts, please".

Iain

[LarryLatham]

Well, seagal12, I am a yankee , and I can verify Iain's analysis, at least as far as candies go.

I'll have to admit I'm a little puzzled by your look at peanuts, though, Iain. How are peanuts uncountable? Couldn't someone, watching his waist, have a look at a large bowl of the critters, and say, "OK, maybe I'll just have five peanuts."

This whole issue of count and non-count nouns, seagal12, is confused by the insistance of some grammar "experts" that certain words are countable and certain others are not. However, my view is that it all depends on how they are used (many features of English word morphology are like that, in fact). Words such as meat might normally be used in a non-count way, but if the user wishes to convey the idea of kinds of meat, it is totally permissable to use meats. I've even read a newspaper article extolling the pleasures of the various weathers of the Northern California coast. Moreover, normal or common usage is a dynamic thing. It is becoming rather unremarkable now, for instance, for people to say candies, as:

"I'm only going to eat three candies today." (As opposed to saying, "I'm only going to eat three pieces of candy today.")

The same is true for beers, coffees, and cokes. Language mavens can protest all they want, but they will lose the arguement in the end, because speakers of English will use it however they feel is appropriate.

You are quite correct to feel confused, and very smart to ask about it. When things about English grammar don't make good sense to you, more than likely it's because you've never had a thorough explanation, and you should question it.

Larry Latham

[Metamorfose]

The way I describe uncountables is: if you would normally only use part of the whole, and you have to measure it when you buy it then it's uncountable. For examples, peanuts are uncountable, "I want 40 grammes of peanuts, please". However, if you buy them in a pre-packaged bag, then the bag (and the peanuts inside) become countable, e.g. "I want two bags of peanuts, please".

Iain

Hey Iain, wouldn't this argumentation fall if we get beans as example? Or is this particular word always written with an s?

José

[dduck]

Looks like the peanut is not a good example.

Normally, you eat a whole peanut, not part of one. Perhaps, things like butter, sauce, water, abstract nouns like knowledge, and information are better examples.

Iain

[LarryLatham]

Not to push this too far, since I have no desire to press the issue to absurdity. However, I can imagine several butters:

French butter, peanut butter, peach butter, certain kinds of industrial butters.

I can certainly imagine a variety of sauces. (I hardly need list them.)

And I can even imagine different waters:

Perier, Evian, lemon water, mineral water, potable water, etc. (Forgive my spelling please, French is Greek to me )

So I think the point is surely pretty clear. The countability parameter does not inhere in any particular word, contrary to the suggestions in some textbooks that it does. One cannot make a list of words that are always countable, or always not countable. Everything depends on how the word is used and in what communicative context. It may be that a particular word is most often, or even almost always used in one way or the other, but that does not preclude use of the same word in the other way by a creative speaker or writer. Students will be better served if we put it to them in this way, and save them the trouble of trying to memorize lists of words which they think must always be non-count.

Larry Latham

[Stephen Jones]

Sorry Larry, but your analysis only applies to a small subset of words.

Car, leg, finger, cup, bullet, dollar and peseta are countable.

Information, data, oxygen. knowledge and *beep* are uncountable.

[LarryLatham]

You are quite right, Stephen. I let myself get carried away without thinking it through carefully.

So it looks really like there are three catagories of nouns: (1) those that are undeniably always countable, (2) those that, by the nature of their meaning, cannot be counted (this subset I would expect to be rather small), and then (3) finally a third subset which can be used either way.

What I should have said in my post above is that this third subset is larger than many people think. It contains words which people might not ordinarily expect to be there.

I hate it when I put my foot in my mouth.
Thanks for the correction, Stephen.

Larry Latham

[szwagier]

Hi!

Just spotted this topic while looking for something completely different. Isn't that always the way?

Anyway, the idea that nouns are count, non-count or both seems too rigid to me.

To take Stephen's example of "legs", I myself use "legs" uncountably on account of the fact that I am very tall, and when required to squeeze into a small space I point out that I have "too much legs". In this situation I emphatically can not say that I have "too many" as I have the generally prescribed number - "too much" is the only logical way to express it.

That doesn't mean that we should suddenly count "legs" in the "both" category, but it does suggest that countability is a spectrum and not an either/or. Nouns move across the spectrum as a result of the concepts we need to express. I would guess, although I have no evidence to back this up, that most of the drift would be from the ends of the spectrum (count or non-) to the middle (both), although I'd be interested if anyone could come up with a counterexample (ie a noun which was once both countable and non-countable and is now only one).


Which in turn leads me to think that Larry is righter (sic) than he thinks when he says that countability doesn't inhere in any particular noun.

[LarryLatham]

Welcome szwagier,

...and thanks for your support! I was feeling a little sheepish, but you've improved my mood considerably. Actually, I think Stephen has made an excellent point in his post above, which I suspect you would also agree to. Nevertheless, your example is very interesting, and does certainly provide evidence that many grammatical features do not inhere directly in words, as so many people tend to think. What is more important, it seems to me, is how they are used. Perhaps there are similar examples as yours for all the words on Stephen's list. And I believe that we all will better informed about how English works if we realize something like that. Still, Stephen's point, I think, is that there do exist certain words which are nearly always used as count nouns, and certain others which are almost inevitably used as non-count nouns. I can't disagree with him there.

Larry Latham
BTW, I really like your idea of a continuum of countability.

[szwagier]

Thanks for the welcome, Larry,

While dredging my memory trying to come up with examples for other words on the list, I recovered a dim recollection of a word which seems to be on the way from uncountable to countable, and the words is "pea".

If I remember correctly, a few centuries ago the form of the word was "pease", which was uncountable (a similar phenomenon is observable in Slavic languages). At some point it was "decided" that "pease" was a plural form and so "pea" was "derived" as the singular form.

These days, "peas" is more frequently used in the plural and followed by a non-3rd-person-singular verb form ("peas taste wonderful"), although the singular is also possible ("the pea has fallen off the plate and rolled under the table").

So what is the status of "pea" now? Can it be used countably? Absolutely. What about uncountably? Not sure, but to my British/Scottish intuition it sounds, at best, marginally acceptable.

That gives the idea of a continuum another little nudge forward, doesn't it? If we can see that it is possible for nouns to move across the spectrum in either direction, then we have a paradigm which covers most of the possibilities. The only thing which troubles me now is how we shoehorn in those nouns which are used only in plural forms: It is just about possible to speak of "a trouser" if you're a professional clothing manufacturer or a fashion guru, but I would be surprised if lingerie producers talked about "an underpant".

Do these nouns cause a problem for the countability-uncountability continuum?

Any thoughts?

PS. I most certainly do agree that some nouns are almost always used countably or not, but I would say that this is for either semantic or pragmatic reasons rather than nouns having a [+/- count] feature at the syntactic level.

[LarryLatham]

Love your imagery!

Larry Latham

[lolwhites]

Sorry to have found this so late, but I thought I'd give it a go. Maybe someone out there will notice.

A student once asked me if it was OK to say "two coffees" or whether it was more correct to say "two cups of coffee". I said it was fine to say "two coffees", although there might be times when you'd have to say the latter (e.g. two cups as opposed to two mugs). She wasn't entirely satisfied with this explanation as it wasn't a clear cut black and white answer, but that's another story...

Anyway, I thought about this later and came to the conclusion that English doesn't divide nouns into two classes, with a few that fall into both. Rather, any noun can be used in a mass or individual sense where the context demands (note the emphasis). Hence, two coffees, or for that matter two coffees and three teas (us Brits love our tea) are perfectly well formed.

I then recalled a time when my two cats both decided to use me as a bed. I spontanously said to my flatmate "I'm drowning in cat" (note the lack of -s even though there were two of them. Reason? I was conceptualising my two pets as a whole, a mass of fur, claws and whiskers rather than two individual felines called Taz and Tigger.

Even when nouns are clearly more often used in one form than another, we usually find "exceptions" that make perfect sense. Furthermore, the form used is usually a question of the physical characteristics of the object in question, not some arbitrary clasification of the masculine/feminie/neuter type.

Incidentally, if some native speaker ESL teacher who's got so used to learning the grammar of their own language from the books that they doubt their own judgement and that of their fellow non-native speakers is planning to tell me that I'm wrong and can't speak my own language because I've violated Unit 13 subsection 5 of their Big English Grammar Book, don't try.

[LarryLatham]

Precisely! A wonderful explanation.

Larry Latham

[revel]

Hey there!

Countable and uncountable only seems to confuse my students. Naturally, they realize that coffee can not stand alone and needs a cup and that that cup is understood when we ask for two coffees, but that does not help them with the task at hand, which is to identify nouns as countable or uncountable on the next exam they have at school, where, despite all of us here being right on the flexibility of use of nouns in each and between the two catagories, they will have to say that coffee is uncountable or get the question wrong. Oh, sad reality!

lol puts it nicely and it's the way I try to get the message through to my students. (Though having two cats as well, have never thought of the cat example!). How do you usually think about that thing, I ask, as a mass or as a group of units? Yes, yes, there are many types of money in the world, but we generally use the Euro and thus there is money. I have 25€ in my pocket, not 25 monies. Water, rice, sugar, again, I could count bottles, kilos, teaspoons and those are in plural, but the other word is in singular. Peas and beans throw a monkeywrench in the works, why do we look at those seeds as individuals and yet rice hast to be a grain before it gets a personality of its own....is it because of the size? Is size important?

Finally, I have to get them to observe what their text books present as the "correct" answer. Mass nouns are usually singular unless we are refering to different types of these same mass nouns. Unit nouns are singular if there is only one and plural if there are many. And peas and beans are good sources of fiber and iron, I suppose. Taking away the maths and making it more an image of a blob and a bunch of sticks often helps get closer to understanding. Practice with the most common gives a point of reference. Making mistakes with the rest of them is where the student learns.

peace,
revel.