| dc.description.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. | en_US |
