영어 가산명사와 불가산명사에 관한 소고

A Thought on the Notion of Countability

This article deals with the notion of countability for nouns in English. Given that nouns refer to entities in reality, it is not too much to say that grammatical properties of nouns stem from the properties of the entities referred to by those nouns. In this article, however, we will show that some properties of the real entities referred to by nouns are filtered out by what we may call 'psychological filters', and therefore do not map into the internal grammar of the speaker. In doing so, we will also show that in many cases grammatical features of nouns reflect how the speaker view the physical entities referred to by the nouns rather than the properties of the entities themselves.