Countable nouns, which as the name suggests are nouns that can be counted, have singular and plural forms. Students in a classroom, books on a shelf, cookies in a jar, or sheep in a pasture can all be counted: one student, two students. The fact that some nouns seem too vast to count does not change their status as countable nouns. You could hypothetically count all the people in China, all the grains of sand on the beach, or all the stars in the sky.
One important note is that some countable nouns have the same form for plural and singular. The word sheep, for example, is the same whether you are talking about one sheep or twenty- fi ve sheep. Yet sheep is still a countable noun. You will have to use context to determine whether the noun is intended to be singular or plural:
The baby sheep is cute.
Fifty sheep are grazing in the pasture.
Uncountable nouns cannot be made plural: furniture, homework, research, water, or rice, for example. We can say We rearranged the dining room furniture, but even though multiple pieces of furniture were involved, dining room furnitures would not be correct.
Here are a couple of simple tests you can use to determine whether a noun is countable or uncountable: If a noun can take a plural ending or be preceded by an indefi nite article (such as a or an), it is countable. If not, it is uncount- able. Also, specifi c quantity determiners can go with nouns depending on their countable/uncountable status. Many can precede count nouns, while much precedes uncountable nouns. Similarly, few (or fewer) precedes countable nouns, while less precedes uncountable nouns. The chart on page 359 pro- vides examples for these tests.
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Tutorial 22 Noun Plurals
Characteristics Countable noun (dog) Uncountable noun (advice) 359 Can it take a plural form? Yes. (dogs) No. (Advice cannot become
advices.) Can it be preceded by an
indefi nite article (a/an)?
Yes. (a dog) No. (A sand is incorrect.) Which quantity determiners
would you use with it (many versus much; few versus less)?
many dogs; few dogs much sand; less sand
Knowing whether nouns are countable or uncountable is usually intuitive for native speakers of En glish. However, this distinction may not seem logical to En glish learners: If you can count two tables and three chairs, why can’t you count fi ve furnitures? When you are learning new nouns in En glish, it is important to pay attention to whether they are countable or uncountable.
This information can be found in En glish learner’s dictionaries, such as the Merriam- Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary.
Also note how the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns relates to the other noun distinctions noted earlier: Though abstract nouns are often uncountable (with some exceptions, such as beliefs or opinions), con- crete nouns can be either countable or uncountable. Contrast cookie, sandwich, or book with sugar, rice, or furniture. These are all concrete, but the second set of nouns is uncountable.
Sometimes sentence context determines whether a noun is countable or uncountable.
Countable Uncountable
I only had two beers last night. Too much beer will make you fat.
Life is like a box of chocolates. I really love to eat chocolate.
You’ll have to analyze how the noun functions in the sentence to determine whether it is countable or uncountable.
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Tutorial 22
But don’t rely on meaning and context clues alone. Consider these examples:
The question of birth order and its infl uence on personality has been examined in many earlier studies.
The question of birth order and its infl uence on personality has been examined in a great deal of earlier research.
These two sentences are paraphrases, sentences that use different wording to say the same thing. Studies and research are synonyms, two words that mean the same thing. But studies in the fi rst sentence is a countable noun (and indeed has been made plural), while research is an uncountable noun, does not have a plural form, and is used with a great deal of. You could not say either a great deal of studies or many research.
It is not surprising that student writers, particularly multilingual writers, might make such errors. It is confusing that two nouns that mean the same thing and are used identically in parallel sentences don’t function the same way. And many instructors are unable to explain exactly why. The explana- tion lies in the history of the En glish language. Content words such as nouns have been imported into En glish from several different languages (French, German, Latin, and Greek primarily, but others as well), and those languages have varying conventions about noun plurals that have persisted into their use in En glish.
If you tend to make these types of errors with noun plurals, you may need to research a par tic u lar noun in an En glish learner’s dictionary to deter- mine its countable or uncountable status. For example, the Merriam- Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary clearly identifi es the noun research as uncountable. How- ever, in several online dictionaries intended for native En glish speakers, the entries for the noun research do not include this information.
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Tutorial 22 Noun Plurals
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PRACTICE 1
The following chart provides examples of challenging En glish nouns. Look up each noun in an online or print dictionary. First use a learner’s dictionary.
(Check your library or search online for “En glish learner’s dictionaries.”) Then compare what you fi nd with entries from a dictionary designed for En glish native speakers. Finally, compose or copy a sentence you found that uses that noun correctly, noticing whether it’s treated as countable or uncount- able, singular or plural, in the sentence. The fi rst one is done for you as an example.
Noun to analyze
Learner’s dictionary information
Native speaker dictionary information
Sample sentence
Equipment uncountable noun
none The equipment for the new hospital is expensive. (collective noun used with singular verb)
Information University Hypothesis Happiness Religion
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Tutorial 22
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Overcoming challenges with noun plurals
Now that you’ve learned about the different noun subcategories, you probably have a better idea of how and why noun plurals can be hard to use correctly in writing. This next section provides advice for writers coping with the com- plexities caused by En glish nouns.