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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 sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
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.
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 result is that for full sentences, there is a combined five-way distinction of singular, dual, paucal, plural, and greater plural. Singular and plural have straightforward number agreements, whereas dual has dual pronouns but paucal articles, paucal has plural pronouns but paucal articles, and greater plural has greater plural pronouns but ...
Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This is a good wine. Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. [ 4 ] In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding -[e]s (as in dogs , bushes ), although there are also irregular forms ( woman/women , foot/feet ), including cases ...
Measure words play a similar role to classifiers, except that they 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 used ...
The English language has a number of words that denote specific or approximate quantities that are themselves not numbers. [1] Along with numerals, and special-purpose words like some, any, much, more, every, and all, they are quantifiers. Quantifiers are a kind of determiner and occur in many constructions with other determiners, like articles ...