noun countability

Question

Are there any recourses on determining the countability of nouns? Either some way to work it out or a dictionary that records whether a noun is likely to countable or not countable?

I'm not interested in whether the noun can be countable but more is it likely to be countable. for instance rice can go to rices which means it can be countable but in most cases it wont be.

Answer 1

This is a tough one. Many English words can be both (beer, time, glass, language, etc etc) depending on the context/meaning.

Figuring out (un)countability from the word alone or from a regular dictionary is impossible or impractical.

You can try to figure it out from a large text corpus by seeing how the word is used:

• if there's a plural form or not
• if there's an indefinite article before it or none
• if it's used with many/few, much/little, a piece of(?), etc

But many words can function as both nouns and adjectives and that complicates matters. For example in an air pump, air functions as an adjective and an refers to pump, not to air.

Likewise, many words can function as both nouns and verbs and have identical forms. For example, in she pressures him, pressures isn't a plural of pressure.

Also, some uncountable nouns can have an indefinite article before them when they are made more specific, e.g. knowledge vs a good practical knowledge.

You can gather statistics from an analyzed corpus and based on it judge whether or not a word is more likely to be countable or uncountable.

Answer 2

There are several existing English lexica that contain information about count/mass/etc. distinctions, none of which quite agree with each other because they focus on slightly different distinctions and it's a complicated task. Two are ComLex and CUVPlus (which I can't find a download link for at the moment, although you can find it mentioned in many places).

Check out the work by Timothy Baldwin and Francis Bond in 2003 on learning noun countability from corpora. If you have many occurrences of an unfamiliar noun in a corpus, you can do fairly well at the task of figuring out whether this noun can possibly be a count noun, can possibly be a mass noun, etc. however individual instances are still be quite difficult to classify. If you have the sentence "the wug was white" and according to your lexicon "wug" can be either count or mass, there's not enough information in the immediate context to help you classify it.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if there is an 'official' dictionary saying if a noun is likely to be countable or not, but I can come up with two ways you could go about this:

• Either assuming that a noun is likely to be uncountable if somebody put it in a 'list of mass nouns' or 'list of uncountable nouns' (you find quite a lot if you google for those phrases, for example this).

• Or make a little corpus study and see how often the word is used in which way: searching "rice" in the Corpus of contemporary american English gives us 22265 hits, while the word "rices" is only found 69 times.

Answer 4

It depends on the context and whether the noun may have plural on its own. Different senses of the same word may differ, e.g.:

• expectation: the feeling vs. what is being expected
• salt: table salt vs. a type of a chemical element

Our API, GlobalNLP, returns the countability of nouns (among other things) in a particular context in this method: https://nlp.linguasys.com/docs/services/53fccbb15cfea30d9c48f8d6/operations/542a6da01c78d80a3cd6692a