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.