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The idea of the "universal grinder" is that, while count nouns usually denote whole, distinct objects (such as a steak, two steaks), the equivalent mass noun connotes a non-distinct quantity of whatever constitutes these objects (some steak). The universal grinder suggests that most count nouns can be used as mass nouns, when the distinct thing ...
Mass nouns have no concept of singular and plural, although in English they take singular verb forms. However, many mass nouns in English can be converted to count nouns, which can then be used in the plural to denote (for instance) more than one instance or variety of a certain sort of entity – for example, "Many cleaning agents today are ...
A bare noun is a noun that is used without a surface determiner or quantifier. [1] In natural languages , the distribution of bare nouns is subject to various language-specific constraints. Under the DP hypothesis a noun in an argument position must have a determiner or quantifier that introduces the noun, warranting special treatment of the ...
In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit consisting of a verb followed by a particle (e.g., turn down, run into, or sit up), sometimes collocated with a preposition (e.g., get together with, run out of, or feed off of).
For example, in "seven-eighths of an apple" the fraction acts as a noun. Compare that to "seven slices of apple" where "apple" is a mass noun and does not require the article "an". Combining the two, e.g. "seven-eighths of a slice of apple", makes it clear the fraction must be a noun referring to a part of another countable noun.
In the first example, the notion denotes the set of "three men" is a subset of "those men". The second example has an overt noun inserted between the quantifier and the partitive PP and is still considered grammatical, albeit odd and redundant to a native speaker of Catalan. The third sentence has an empty noun holding the final noun position.
Every noun in this language must have its corresponding classifier when used with a numeral or other quantifier. Most nouns take the generic classifier ṭa, although there are many more specific measure words, such as jon, which is only used to count humans. Still, there are many fewer measure words in Bengali than in Chinese or Japanese.
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.