Conceptual And Grammatical Distinctions Between Count And .

1Conceptual and grammatical distinctions between count and non-count nounsLeslie Davis, Kathleen Hamel and Anne SheriffColorado State University

2The acquisition of count and mass noun distinction by English language learners (ELLs)proves difficult for reasons such as the presence or lack thereof of these distinctions in the L1,the possibility of individuation, and the possibility for abstract nouns to be counted. As seen inourexperiencewithEnglishlanguage-CSU and at Thelearners’Writing Center, failure to properly attribute mass or count status to a noun can affect pluralmarkers, contribute to improper use of modifiers and quantifiers, and lead to improper use ofarticles. Because of the wide range of issues that can stem from this classification, we chose toexplore why learners might be unable to properly determine count or mass status.Fieder, Nickels, and Biederman (2014) take a cognitive linguistic approach indetermining whether or not it is the grammatical features or the semantic features of these nounswhich contribute to their countability. Instead of conducting a study of their own, they look atclaims that mass nouns are either marked or unmarked. The possibility for addition,indivisibility, boundaries, and the cognitive individuation hypothesis are all used to give thereader some context for their argument. In particular, the cognitive individuation hypothesisstates that people classify nouns based on how they interact with and perceive these nouns,meaning that how easily distinguishable these nouns are will have an effect on their perceptionof countability. Different languages may classify the same noun in different ways (e.g. Frenchmeuble is count, English furniture is mass, and Japanese does not make a distinction), meaningthat their perception of and interaction with this noun is conceptually different. However, as theresearch has shown, there is a conceptual connection across languages that contradicts ideas oflinguistic relativity (Iwasaki, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2010).Beginning with English and Japanese, Fieder, Nickels and Biedermann (2014) discuss thedifferent ways of differentiating between count and mass. Japanese does not distinguish nouns by

3whether or not they are countable, but rather by how they can be counted. For example, Japaneseuses classifiers to demonstrate the shape of an object, its function (e.g. building), or its portion(e.g. a slice of something), and countability is never specified unless the speaker wants to countthe noun, and any noun has that possibility of being counted by a classifier (Inagaki, 2014;Iwasaki, Vinson & Vigliocco, 2010). Shirahata found that the indefinite article a was among thelast forms to be acquired by Japanese learners of English (Inagaki, 2014), and its characteristic asa denumerator (Fieder, Nickels, & Biedermann, 2014) may contribute to this difficulty.Iwasaki, Vinson, and Vigliocco (2010) conducted a study to determine whether nativeEnglish speakers and native Japanese speakers would make similar errors which would reveal aconceptual link to countability, rather than a grammatical link. According to Iwasaki et al.(2010), linguistic relativity should implicate that English speakers are more sensitive todifferences between count and mass than their Japanese-speaking counterparts. However, iflinguistic relativity proved incorrect that sensitivity should be shared, and the errors that theparticipants in both English and Japanese make would show a mass/count connection er”,response.For exampla conceptualrrect andincorrect answer share the same characteristic of non-count. Again, linguistic relativity wouldassume that the mistakes made by learners in each language would reveal conceptual differencesrather than similarities, because each language has its own conception of count and mass nouns.However, at the end of their study, Iwasaki, Vinson and Vigliocco (2010) found evidence againstlinguistic relativity, because the errors made

To continue examining these levels of distinction between count and non-count nouns, the researchers determined there were four categories of nouns: concrete count (CC) nouns (for example: cup), abstract count (AC) nouns (for example: idea),