Сан мөлшері біртұтас қарастырылатын есімдер

Noun whose quantity is treated as an undifferentiated unit

In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non count nouns are distinguished from count nouns. Given that different languages have different grammatical features, the actual test for which nouns are mass nouns may vary between languages. In English, mass nouns are characterized by the impossibility of being directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement and by the impossibility of being combined with an indefinite article (a or an). Thus, the mass noun "water" is quantified as "20 litres of water" while the count noun "chair" is quantified as "20 chairs". However, both mass and count nouns can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e. g., "so much water", "so many chairs", though note the different quantifiers "much" and "many"). Mass nouns have no concept of singular and plural, although in English they take singular verb forms. However, many mass nouns in English can be converted to count nouns, which can then be used in the plural to denote (for instance) more than one instance or variety of a certain sort of entity – for example, "Many cleaning agents today are technically not soaps [i. e. types of soap], but detergents," or "I drank about three beers [i. e. bottles or glasses of beer]". Some nouns can be used indifferently as mass or count nouns, e. g., three cabbages or three heads of cabbage; three ropes or three lengths of rope. Some have different senses as mass and count nouns: paper is a mass noun as a material (three reams of paper, one sheet of paper), but a count noun as a unit of writing ("the students passed in their papers").

In English (and in many other languages), there is a tendency for nouns referring to liquids (water, juice), powders (sugar, sand), or substances (metal, wood) to be used in mass syntax, and for nouns referring to objects or people to be count nouns. But there are many exceptions: the mass/count distinction is a property of the terms, not their referents. For example, the same set of chairs can be referred to as "seven chairs" (count) and as "furniture" (mass); the Middle English mass noun pease has become the count noun pea by morphological reanalysis; "vegetables" are a plural count form, while the British English slang synonym "veg" is a mass noun. In languages that have a partitive case, the distinction is explicit and mandatory. For example, in Finnish, join vettä, "I drank (some) water", the word vesi, "water", is in the partitive case. The related sentence join veden, "I drank (the) water", using the accusative case instead, assumes that there was a specific countable portion of water that was completely drunk. The work of logicians like Godehard Link and Manfred Krifka established that the mass/count distinction can be given a precise, mathematical definition in terms of quantization and cumulativity.

Some quantifiers are specific to mass nouns (e. g., an amount of) or count nouns (e. g., a number of, every). Others can be used with both types (e. g., a lot of, some).

There is often confusion about the two different concepts of collective noun and mass noun. Generally, collective nouns such as group, family, and committee are not mass nouns but are rather a special subset of count nouns. However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries) because users conflate two different kinds of verb number invariability: (a) that seen with mass nouns such as "water" or "furniture", with which only singular verb forms are used because the constituent matter is grammatically nondiscrete (although it may ["water"] or may not ["furniture"] be etically nondiscrete); and (b) that seen with collective nouns, which is the result of the metonymical shift between the group and its (both grammatically and etically) discrete constituents. Some words, including "mathematics" and "physics", have developed true mass noun senses despite having grown from count noun roots.