[Music] [Music] all right welcome back to lin204 okay so this week uh we are going to revisit syntactic categories a little bit and so last week we spent a lot of time on the syntactic category distribution tests uh which were sort of these operational definitions of what a noun is what a verb is etc so that you know you can look at a word in any given sentence and determine what kind of behavior that word has and from that kind of behavior uh you can answer the question of what category does that word belong to in that particular context is it a noun is it a verb is it an adjective etc so what we saw in the syntactic category distribution test was the fact that you know some of these tests were sometimes like you know an adjective often can be modified by the word very it can often appear in the comparative uh often times nouns can be pluralized things like that so i want to elaborate on those kinds of qualifications today so what do i mean by like some of them do but some of them don't have that property okay um and so this has to do with the fact that there are different kinds of nouns and there's different kinds of verbs there's different kinds of adjectives etc so in this week's lecture let's talk about these subcategories of these syntactic categories that we saw last week all right let's get started the first category that we are going to revisit today is nouns okay um and so we saw with the syntactic category distribution test for nouns that you know nouns can often be pluralized right and so we do have nouns like member in the english language and so we get example sentences like how many members are in bts where the plural s does show up on member we also say things like there are seven members in bts right and so when you have a plurality of the members you have the s the plural suffix that shows up and of course if you have a plurality of members then you wouldn't ask things like how much member is in bts right and so it strictly has to be something like how many members however you also have words like salt which is also a noun in the english language but this kind of noun doesn't always allow for polarization and so when you have questions like how many salts did jin put in the soup how many salts did jin put in the soup that sounds a little bit odd right especially if the intended interpretation is something like you know what is the amount of salt that jim put in the soup this is not how you would ask this kind of question similarly when you say something like gin put 100 salts in the soup if you mean something like 100 grains of salt or something like that right this is not something you can actually say in the english language jim put 100 salts in the soup and so that sounds a little bit funny right okay so the way that you would ask this question is something like how much salt did jin put in the soup so there is a class of nouns which doesn't typically like to be pluralized nouns can be divided into what's called count nouns versus mass nouns okay and so remember the noun member that we saw is an example of what's called account noun so what is a count noun okay account noun is a noun that can be syntactically counted in that particular language i'm going to elaborate on what this means in just a second but let me give you some examples first and so something like member right is account now we can count how many members in the english language right and so you can say things like seven members let's say okay um you also have words like album nine albums song many songs right uh award is also a count noun and so many awards uh the word fan as in a million fans or photo many photos so in all of these cases right you actually see the plural s show up and you can actually like specifically count how many in the english language something like salt is what is fundamentally a mass noun okay um and so mass nouns are nouns that are treated as sort of uncountable syntactically speaking in a particular language okay and so what do i mean by uncountable um uncountable things are sort of like classified as you know undifferentiated units of things so in other words salt is not something that you know like like an object that you count as much as like you know it's sort of a substance almost right just a blob of salt is what it is and so it's sort of an undifferentiated blob of unit right here so mass nouns typically include things that are like substances and so things like salt or like mud or blood are considered mass nouns fundamentally speaking in the english language um but you also have sort of like more abstract entities sometimes so things like beauty or intelligence right and so things that you can't like concretely touch on a lot of these uh abstract nouns are oftentimes mass nouns also we talked about the word furniture before and so you can't pluralize furniture so you can't say things like many furnitures in the english language okay so um instead what you would say is things like so much furniture right and so a lot of salt so much salt it's a lot of mud a lot of blood a lot of rain a lot of cereal so much beauty so much intelligence right and notice in all of these cases the plural s actually doesn't show up on that noun so how do you know when something is a count noun or a mass noun in a sentence there's actually distribution tests for the specific kind of noun okay um and so here are some distribution tests for count nouns okay and so as we have seen already count nouns can be pluralized so it takes the plural s or other forms of the plural in the english language um and so you get things like member right and so i like the members of bts and so the s shows up on member right okay um and so number two the other property of count nouns is that obviously they can be counted and so you can explicitly have numerals that precede it and so you can say things like there are seven members in bts or seven is the numeral which is the counting number right there so the third property of count nouns concerns the word many okay and so many is a quantificational word um and so it tells you like how many things so you're counting things right um and so in particular you use the word many uh for count nouns and so you would ask questions like how many okay or you might say things like so many okay for count nouns so a specific example uh for example is uh how many members are in bts or uh there are so many members in bts this contrasts with a word like much which is not used for count nouns and so you wouldn't ask things like how much member is in vts that would be an unacceptable expression in english so the fourth property of count nouns is actually related to the first property which was the pluralization um and so you can say things like a lot of members okay um and so it has that plural s of course and so when you talk about a large quantity with the expression a lot of um the plural s of course shows up with that particular noun and so you say things like there are a lot of members in bts in contrast here are some distribution tests for mass nouns okay how do you know when something is acting like a mass noun in a sentence you could try some of these tests okay um and so uh something like salt is a mass noun and so it cannot be pluralized so that's the first property right here so if you say something like gin put salt in the soup right if the intended meaning is something like jin put salt in the soup this is not how you would say it in the english language jin put salt in the soup sounds a little bit funny the second property is that mass nouns cannot be counted um and so typically when you put a numeral in front of it it's going to sound a little bit funny i mean if you say something like gin put 100 salts in the soup okay uh so that sounds a little bit odd especially if you mean that you know like he put just like a blob of salt in the soup or something like that this is not how you would express it what you could say is something like you know gin put 100 grains of salt in the soup something like that but notice in that case you're counting the actual grains right and so the pluralization actually happens with the word grain rather than the word salt number three maths nouns use the word much instead of many okay and so you would ask questions like how much or you would say things like so much of something for example how much salt did gin put in the soup okay you wouldn't ask things like how many salts did he put in typically you can also say gin put so much salt in the soup again the water here is much the fourth property which is again related to the first property is that you say a lot of mass noun and the mass noun shows up without the plural marking so even if something is a mass noun you can still express that there's a large quantity of it and you can use words like a lot of okay and so you can say things like jim put a lot of salt in the soup but notice here that there is no s on salt right this is the distinction between count nouns and mass noun so there's one important note about the count and the mass distinction okay and so i remember i said that a count noun can be syntactically counted okay and so this means that like in the language you can count it linguistically speaking you can count member and the other side of this is that something like salt is a mass noun okay and this means that you know a mass now cannot be syntactically counted okay linguistically speaking you cannot count that thing in that language okay and so what do i mean by that by that i mean that it's not that you know it's impossible to count salt you know what i mean and so like like we said you can have like little grains of salt that you can count and so it's not that conceptually salt is impossible to count so perhaps another good example this is the word hair in the english language and so typically you ask things like how much hair okay so how much hair does sugar have on his head okay things like that um you wouldn't ask things like how many hairs in the english language okay um and so this suggests that hair is sort of typically a mass noun in the english language because you use the words um how and much how much in this case this does not mean that like conceptually you cannot count hair right because like you can't count hair it's like you can count strands of hair like this so like conceptually speaking these things are completely countable in some sense it just so happens that english grammatically decided that it was a mass noun english just happened to decide that you know even though you can kind of count it like this counts as sort of an undifferentiated unit if you look in a language like french for example hair or shiva is actually a count noun and so you will actually say things like ang shavu or deshavu or leish where uh hair literally the word hair has a singular form and the plural form in fact when you're talking about someone's hair like this in the french language you would say things like leish in the plural form but in english you wouldn't say things like oh i like your hairs right so conceptually speaking a lot of things are countable so the count and the mass distinction in language really has to do with like what decision the language made grammatically speaking for the purposes of the grammatical rules of the language are we going to put this noun in the count or the masked category and this can vary from language to language so the moral of the story here is that when you're trying to decide if something is a count noun or a mass noun in a sentence um don't worry about like conceptually like is it countable or not right that's sort of not what the count mass distinction is and so what you want to be looking at is sort of the behavior of the word in that sentence so you're looking at the distribution of that word so you might have noticed that i keep on saying things like salt is fundamentally a mass noun and member is fundamentally a count noun and this is because uh actually depending on the context depending on what sentence the noun is in it can take on account interpretation or a mass interpretation this means that even if you are sort of born a count noun you can sort of be uh like a forced into a mass interpretation depending on the context of the sentence so for example the word soda okay and so you might think of soda as this liquid substance right and so you might expect this to be a mass noun in the english language so you indeed get sentences like how much soda did jungkook drink okay in this case this this is grammatical this is acceptable to say um and so a soda is behaving as a mass noun in this particular question however you are also able to ask things like how many sodas did jungkook drink okay and so with the how many in the pluralization this time and this kind of sentence sort of has the container interpretation um and so it's true that soda in general is sort of a liquid blob substance but you can put the blob you can put the liquid into containers like soda cans for example right so when you ask things like how many sodas did jungkook drink right you're asking about typically things like you know how many cans of soda did he drink so you're talking about the container so when you take a mass noun and turn it into these countable entities like this so for example the soda cans uh you actually do see nouns showing up in the count form and so for example it shows up at the pluralization in that kind of context so another example of a mass noun turning into like countable containers is like t the word t right and so uh it can be used in the mass sense and so there's a lot of t right and so like in this kind of case that's a lot of tea you know it's like that's just like a substance of tea right here right it's that mass blob you can't even see from far away these little tea leaves right and so that's a lot of tea okay you know what i mean but then like you know uh if you put them into little sachets i suppose you have a lot of peas right here right one tea two teas right and so i have a lot of teas in this container and so that would be the count interpretation of t okay and so mass t and count t here's another example the word cheese okay so cheese is again like the blob of substances so it's typically a mass noun in the english language so you would ask things like how much cheese did sugar eat okay how much cheese did he eat okay but you can also ask things like how many cheeses did suga try okay how many cheeses did suga try okay and so in the second question right here how many cheeses uh you're usually not talking about like you know how many like you know pieces of cheese or anything like that this is talking about the kinds of cheese and so this has the interpretation of how many kinds of cheese did he try so another way of making masked nouns countable in the english language is to sort of assign it that kind interpretation so kinds of things is sort of how you can separate this sort of substance the other way around happens as well and so something that you might think of as a count noun can have a mass interpretation in certain contexts so for example j-hope bought so many pumpkins j-hope bought so many pumpkins many in the plural suggest that pumpkin is being used as a count noun in this sentence however right if you say something like j-hope crashed the truck and there was so much pumpkin everywhere so much pumpkin everywhere this is actually okay to say in the english language and the interpretation here is something like you know pumpkin substance right there was like you know like he crashed and the pumpkins got smashed and he had pumpkin substance everywhere right is what this means so it doesn't literally have to be turned into a substance for it to have a mass used like this and so for example like you could say something like so much pumpkin if you like go to a pumpkin patch and there's just like so many pumpkins just like all over like it's just like the ground is just covered with like millions of pumpkins right and so uh in that kind of case i could imagine someone saying so much pumpkin everywhere okay uh and so in that kind of context right and the reason that you can sort of turn it into a mass sort of uh use of it is because you know pumpkin there's so many pumpkins that it's sort of like indistinguishable like where one pumpkin starts and where the other one ends something like that okay so that's it for count versus mass nouns and so i hope it's clear that there's different kinds of nouns and there are actually ways to figure out what kind of noun you have in a sentence so make sure you do the practice this week in the next video let's talk about prepositions okay see you in that video