Back to Nouns: Noun Meaning

When I talk with my college students about noun semantics, I mostly reassure them these distinctions (abstract-concrete, mass-count, and proper-common) are true of all languages, and these are real distinctions that we all have in our heads. So it’s all pretty straightforward. Some words, admittedly, are tricky because these semantic notions of abstractness, for example, are hard to pin down. We need to call in the philosophers. Or call in the fourth graders.

Deidre wrote to me that in the course of discussing various nouns last week, her 4th(ish) graders concluded that “actual people, places, things and ideas aren't nouns themselves, but the words for them are nouns. I [Deidre] demonstrated by picking up Tucker (my dog) and saying I wasn't picking up a noun, but that the word Tucker is a noun. All of this created some interesting discussions and challenged their abstract thinking.”

Concrete nouns are simple labels for things that we can see and touch: toad, belly button, rug, Tucker. Abstract nouns are, well, abstract – you can’t see or touch them: love, truth, friendliness. But some words pose a challenge for our definition of abstract. Can you see or touch weather? Or how about unicorn?

Philosophers and semanticists have thought a lot about these things, most agreeing that abstract nouns can be further divided into different subcategories: events and processes that exist but that you can’t actually see (weather, temperature) and other things that are not observable (happiness, freedom). Where does that leave unicorns, ghosts, fairies, and monsters? Ask your students and see what they come up with!

As for count and mass, that’s a real distinction too, and a fairly straightforward one. Count nouns are countable, mass nouns are not.
mass nouns: rice, mud, mail
count nouns: frog, idea, shoe
And there are some handy tests to distinguish these. Count nouns can be pluralized and they can occur with numbers or other words that express quantities: each, both, many, etc. Mass nouns, can’t be pluralized, can’t be counted, and occur with much or less. (But both mass and count nouns can occur with the, all, and some.)

Take some nouns and try them out. Can the noun be pluralized? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with a? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with much? (If so, it’s a mass noun.) Did you find any nouns that work both ways, like light? (I turned on two lights. There is not much light in this room.)

Parenthetical on less: In general, less is used with mass nouns, while fewer is used with count nouns. But less has long been used with count nouns too, in fact. Many a grocery store sign says “10 Items or Less,” and although some people get upset about it, less has been used with countable things ever since English was English. Apparently, King Alfred (the Great) who was a staunch defender of English used it that way in his writings, way back in the 800s. And we’ve seen it ever since. But this isn’t LanguageLog (where I’m sure there are lots of discussions of this. I just checked, and there are here).

So knowing these labels and making our unconscious knowledge of the distinctions into conscious knowledge could make our lives a lot better. Or it could at least make MadLibs a lot funnier. This word game is sometimes the only place that my students have ever encountered parts of speech labels. I like MadLibs. And it reinforces what we already know - that word games are fun, and that even parts of speech are fun (and funny). But the restrictive parts of speech labels that MadLibs offers are sometimes problematic, and not having fine enough distinctions for nouns is one of the issues. So you might have something like

She seized (number) ______ (noun) _______.

And then, say, you write in She seized six rice. Or She seized 10,000 homework. It’s not even funny because the syntax is weird. Rice and homework are mass nouns, not count nouns, and numbers only occur with nouns that are countable. That’s a fact about the language, and should be a fact about MadLibs. These are real distinctions with real labels, and if MadLibs used these finer distinctions, then kids would learn the labels.

So I think we should come up with a better version of MadLibs that has more options – mass noun, count noun, abstract noun, concrete noun, not to mention degree word and quantifier. Who’s in?