What is it about?
The article discusses the latest findings concerning countability and uncountability in English. It shows that one of the cognitive linguistics theories, Cognitive Grammar, allows us to adopt a realistic, though seemingly radical approach to count and mass nouns - that actually any English noun can have both count and mass senses. The article discusses the types of mass senses that typically count nouns can have and illustrates them with numerous, real-life examples.
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Why is it important?
It helps to solve several notorious problems present in English grammar: proposes a procedure of checking whether a noun considered to be exclusively count also has mass senses (and vice versa); proposes a hierarchy of schematic structures due to which it is possible to classify all such extended senses and (re)organise the previous classificatory attempts.
Perspectives
While typically publications discuss the same old examples that have been discussed a number of times, the paper is illustrated with novel ones. It also offers an insightful analysis of countability and uncountability.
Grzegorz Drożdż
University of Silesia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New insights into English count and mass nouns – the Cognitive Grammar perspective, English Language and Linguistics, September 2020, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1360674319000480.
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