ABSTRACT
Some of the mass noun’s functions overlap with the count noun’s. For example, both can be used as shell nouns (‘There is some hope of an increase’, ‘The hope of finding survivors faded’). But most are distinct, in particular elliptical uses. These occur when the object of hope is not specified, but is left for the audience to infer. In ‘The man on death row had lost hope’, for example, the natural inference is that the object of hope was a reprieve or a commutation of sentence. However, there is a spectrum of ellipsis, ranging from cases like this one, to examples such as ‘The birth of a baby gave us hope for the future’, which has a much fuzzier cloud of possibilities, the details being left to the reader’s imagination. At the end of the spectrum are examples such as ‘The country must regain its capacity to symbolise hope’, where ‘hope’ refers not only to an indeterminate number of possible objects-of-hope, but also to the ideals, projects, psychological states and social structures conducive to hoping. Finally, the mass noun can be the subject of a sentence (‘Hope dies last’), a role in which it is arguably a disguised plural.
