mass (adj.)

A term used in the GRAMMATICAL classification of NOUNS; opposed to COUNT. The term refers to those nouns which the speaker treats as continuous entities, having no natural bounds (contrasting with the separable ‘countable’ quality of count nouns); but the distinction is not made on SEMANTIC grounds alone; the contrasting pattern of co-occurrence with DETERMINERS, QUANTIFIERS, etc., is the main evidence, e.g. *an anger v. some anger shows this to be a mass noun. There is no logical reason why nouns should be count or mass: a concept may be countable in one language, but mass in another, as in the case of information, which is mass in English (in modern times), but countable in French (des informations).