Strongly non-countable nouns: Strategies against individuality

Studies in countability have uncovered a range of ontological entities which permit
counting, including natural concrete individuals, discrete events, and taxonomic
subkinds. Identifying the reasons why nominal referents may not be counted has
been less successful, however, and remains controversial. This paper examines
nouns that are “strongly non-countable”, those nouns for which combination with
the plural marker, quantifiers, and nearly all other forms of determination is a
vanishingly rare event. This paper develops a data set of nearly 500 such nouns,
adducing their strongly non-countable status from usage over a 350 million word
corpus (Davies 2009). Through further internet searches, we attest rare, but
possible, patterns of coercion available to these nouns. We then develop a classification
of the different notional categories that these nouns belong to. Finally, we examine
broad distributional patterns and argue that these strongly non-countable nouns
contrast with countable nouns as to their patterns of usage, in particular, being
less discourse-salient and less referential than their count noun counterparts.