Mass Noun - Multiple Senses For One Noun

Multiple Senses For One Noun

Many English nouns can be used in either mass or count syntax, and in these case, they take on cumulative reference when used as mass nouns. For example, one may say that "there's apple in this sauce," and then apple has cumulative reference, and, hence, is used as a mass noun. The names of animals, such as "chicken", "fox" or "lamb" are count when referring to the animals themselves, but are mass when referring to their meat, fur, or other substances produced by them. (eg, "I'm cooking chicken tonight" or "This coat is made of fox.") Conversely, "fire" is frequently used as a mass noun, but "a fire" refers to a discrete entity. Interestingly, "fire" as a count noun does allow cumulative reference, since if two fires join in a forest, they are referred to as one fire. Substance terms like "water" which are frequently used as mass nouns, can be used as count nouns to denote arbitrary units of a substance ("Two waters please") or of several types/varieties ("waters of the world"). One may say that mass nouns that are used as count nouns are "countified" and that count ones that are used as mass nouns are "massified". However, this may confuse syntax and semantics, by presupposing that words which denote substances are mass nouns by default. According to many accounts, nouns do not have a lexical specification for mass-count status, and instead are specified as such only when used in a sentence. Nouns differ in the extent to which they can be used flexibly, depending largely on their meanings and the context of use. For example the count noun "house" is difficult to use as mass (though clearly possible), and the mass noun "cutlery" is most frequently used as mass, despite the fact that it denotes objects, and has count equivalents in other languages:

• Bad: *There is house on the road. (Bad even if the situation of war is considered)
• Bad: *There is a cutlery on the table. (Bad even if just one fork is on the table)

• Good: You get a lot of house for your money since the recession.
• Good: Spanish cutlery is my favorite. (type / kind reading)

In some languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, it has been claimed by some that all nouns are effectively mass nouns, requiring a measure word to be quantified.