ABSTRACT
We have assumed so far that nouns come with their count status already established. Dictionaries tell us that a certain word is count or noncount, or, in certain cases, both. In the paper below, David Lee tries to account for count status using an approach called Cognitive Linguistics, which seeks to find a semantic (i.e. meaning-based) rationale for grammatical phenomena. We have already seen 194 in C2 that the count status of a noun can change if a specific meaning is needed (e.g. ‘beer’ can become ‘a beer’). But Lee goes much further, arguing that count status is principally determined by meaning.
