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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.
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Countable nouns are for things we can count using numbers. They have a singular and a plural form. The singular form can use the determiner "a" or "an". If you want to ask about the quantity of a countable noun, you ask "How many?" combined with the plural countable noun.
These are called uncountable nouns, because they cannot be separated or counted. Other common uncountable nouns include: accommodation, baggage, homework, knowledge, money, permission, research, traffic, travel. These nouns are not used with a/an or numbers and are not used in the plural.
In contrast, uncountable nouns cannot be counted. They have a singular form and do not have a plural form – you can't add an s to it. E.g., dirt, rice, information and hair. Some uncountable nouns are abstract nouns such as advice and knowledge.
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:
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.
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