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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.
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 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 ...
The determinative function is typically obligatory in a singular, countable, common noun phrase (compare I have a new cat to *I have new cat). Semantically , determiners are usually definite or indefinite (e.g., the cat versus a cat ), [ 4 ] and they often agree with the number of the head noun (e.g., a new cat but not * many new cat ).
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1]
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 ...
The term measure word is also sometimes used to refer to numeral classifiers, which are used with count nouns in some languages. For instance, in English no extra word is needed when saying "three people", but in many East Asian languages a numeral classifier is added, just as a measure word is added for uncountable nouns in English. For example: