A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Noun Countability In Published Linguistics Articles

Abstract

The countability of nouns has long been a topic of interest for many linguists and grammarians because of its complex linguistic and cognitive nature. In literature, countability has been viewed as a binary phenomenon in the early period of its history, that is nouns are classified as either countable or uncountable nouns. However, more recent research has shown that this is not the case and that it is better to view countability as highly contextdependent. Nouns can be used flexibly as both countable and uncountable nouns. In the present study, I examined these two views in the context of specialized language (i.e., linguistics), as opposed to previous studies, which focused only on the general language domain. The method employed is corpus-based approach. I built a corpus of 165 linguistics published research articles and extract relevant instances of 44 target nouns to analyze their countability properties. The analysis generated two groups of nouns, namely those that are used only used as countable or uncountable nouns, and those that are used flexibly. This finding suggested that countability is not a binary classification. The study concluded with some implications for countability theory.