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The concept of a "mass noun" is a grammatical concept and is not based on the innate nature of the object to which that noun refers. For example, "seven chairs" and "some furniture" could refer to exactly the same objects, with "seven chairs" referring to them as a collection of individual objects but with "some furniture" referring to them as a single undifferentiated unit.
In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Uncountable nouns are distinguished from count nouns.
The things could be countable objects such as individual items available as units for sale, or an uncountable material. Even though the word "sample" implies a smaller quantity taken from a larger amount, sometimes full biological or mineralogical specimens are called samples if they are taken for analysis, testing, or investigation like other ...
Classifiers play a similar role to measure words, except that measure words denote a particular quantity of something (a drop, a cupful, a pint, etc.), rather than the inherent countable units associated with a count noun. Classifiers are used with count nouns; measure words can be used with mass nouns (e.g. "two pints of mud"), and can also be ...
Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or counting quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article such as a or an (in languages that have such articles). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.
Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer and not less should be used with countable nouns, [2] and that less should be used only with uncountable nouns. This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, [ 3 ] [ 1 ] and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.
Being countable implies being subcountable. In the appropriate context with Markov's principle , the converse is equivalent to the law of excluded middle , i.e. that for all proposition ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } holds ϕ ∨ ¬ ϕ {\displaystyle \phi \lor \neg \phi } .
The best known example of an uncountable set is the set of all real numbers; Cantor's diagonal argument shows that this set is uncountable. The diagonalization proof technique can also be used to show that several other sets are uncountable, such as the set of all infinite sequences of natural numbers , and the set of all subsets of the set of natural numbers.