| Count Noun |
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: We saw seven cows in the garden.
: There is a cow in the garden. : There are cows in the garden. : There is cattle in the garden.
: Every cow is an animal. : There are several cows in the garden.
Some determiners can be used with both mass and count nouns, including "some", "a lot (of)", "no". A common misunderstanding concerning the mass/count distinction is that it is based on the type of thing the different nouns Refer to. Mass nouns are thought to refer to things (or substances) that can't be counted, while count nouns are supposed to refer to ones that can. That this can't be right is seen with our examples above, using ''cow'' (count) and ''cattle'' (mass). If we have seven cows in the garden, they can be described both as "cows" and as "cattle". The mass/count distinction must therefore pertain to the expressions themselves ("cow" vs. "cattle") and not to the things they refer to. One may say that the noun "cattle" ''present'' the cows as a mass, while the noun "cow" presents them as individuated specimens. Some substances have physical properties which makes it difficult to refer to them with a count noun. For example, it is difficult to think about air as individuated chunks (unless we are discussing air at a molecular level). Consequently, we tend to refer to air with the Mass Noun "air". If we specify the unit of Measurement , we can refer to even such substances as count, as in "two litres of wine". But the mass/count distinction remains a Grammatical classification of ''expressions'' and not the sort of thing they refer to. Following the work of logicians like Godehard Link and Manfred Krifka , we know that the mass/count distinction can be given a precise mathematical definition in terms of notions like Cumulativity and Quantization . Some languages treat all nouns as basically mass, and need to make use of a Noun Classifier to add Numeral s and other Quantifier s. To take an example from Mandarin Chinese , which marks count(ed) nouns with a Noun Classifier : Na4 ren2 chi1 wan2 le can equally well mean "That person has eaten" or "Those people have eaten" - you're not counting them, so you don't need a classifier, and Mandarin doesn't distinguish singular vs. plural Na4 wei4 ren2 chi1 wan2 le Na4 san1 wei4 ren2 chi1 wan2 le A classifier, therefore, implies that the object(s) referred to are countable in the sense that the speaker intends them to be enumerated, rather than considered as a unit (regardless of quantity). On the other hand, words such as "milk" or "rice" are not count nouns, but they can be counted with an appropriate unit of measure (e.g. "''glasses'' of milk" or "''spoonfuls'' of rice"). This leads to another example from Mandarin to illustrate some further points about count nouns:
In both cases, the word "book" is a count noun, and in Mandarin take the classifier "ben3" This use of a classifier is similar to, but not identical with, the use of units of measure to count ''groups'' of objects in English. For example, in "three shelves of books", "shelves" is used as a unit of measurement, and ''books'' is indeed a mass noun, since the speaker is not counting individual books - she is counting ''shelves'' of books. By contrast, in the sentence "At 10 books per shelf, you have 30 books," both instances of "books" are an example of a count noun, and require a "measure word" in Chinese (or, as linguists sometimes call it, a "noun classifier", of which Measure Word s are one type). Different languages may treat "measured nouns" differently from "count nouns"; some, like Mandarin, will require a classifier before the unit of measure, while others may not require them at all. ''San1 bei bei1-zi mian4'' "Three cups (of) noodles" versus ''San1 kuai4 mian4'' "Three [classifier noodles". (Notice that the classifier changes as what is counted (cups vs. noodles) changes!)
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