1.3.4.2 Nouns

Besides morphological irregularity, there are also a number of problematic cases. Some nouns express concepts for which number distinctions are not normally made. For example, sand refers to stuff that naturally comes in a quantity for which the division into ‘one’ (singular) and ‘more than one’ (plural) is not particularly natural. Nouns which naturally accommodate this distinction are known as count nouns and those that do not are called mass nouns. If we wish to individuate mass nouns, we usually do this in terms of another noun which names a unit of what the mass noun refers to and put this into a more complicated construction, known as the partitive: