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Determiners that can be used with Uncountable Nouns include ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘that’, most quantifiers, possessives, and interrogatives.
Determiners that can not be used with Uncountable Nouns include ‘a’/’an’, ‘these’, ‘those’, and numerals. The distributive quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, and ‘either’ also cannot be used with Uncountable Nouns.
- Uncountable Nouns may also be called mass nouns.
- When it comes to words like ‘steak’ or ‘paper’, such substances can be presented in confined amounts, making them potentially discrete. Their countability then depends on the context. When the discrete units are relevant, then the noun should be countable (for “Prepare 3 steads for table #14”, it matters because the three units are probably going to three different customers). But when the discrete units are not relevant, then the noun should be uncountable (for “I ate so much steak”, it doesn’t matter whether the meat came from one large piece of steak or two smaller pieces of steak).
- Gerunds are generally uncountable.
Quantifier Determiners and Limiting Adjectives like ‘the whole’, ‘the entire’, and ‘the full’ can be used with singular nouns, but not plural or uncountable nouns.
Quantities that include ‘of’ are used with plural and uncountable nouns, but usually not singular nouns. Such phrases include ‘full of’, ‘a collection of’, and ‘a shortage of’
You might notice that some of the collective terms reflect an aspect of that animal’s behavior or appearance, which makes some of them quite humorous.
More importantly, most of these collective terms have fallen out of fashion in recent decades, even among animal experts. Some of the few that remain include ‘a pride of lions’ and ‘a gaggle of geese’.
Collective terms that can be applied to multiple species are preferred in most cases. These include ‘herd’ (for prey mammals), ‘pack’ (for predator mammals), ‘flock’ (for birds), ‘school’ (for fish), and ‘swarm’ (for insects).
Even More Things to Know
Objects and substances can generally be categorized as having either a homogenous or heterogenous composition. In other words, they are made up either of the same thing or of multiple different things. For example, water is made up of … well … water, and thus is homogenous. But a chair is made up of legs, a seat, and a back, and typically has multiple materials (like fabric, metal, plastic, wood, etc.), and thus is heterogenous.
It’s important to note that the composition doesn’t necessarily correlate to that of sciences like chemistry (wherein water molecules are made up of hydrogen and oxygen). When it comes to grammar, we generally restrain our considerations to what we as humans tend to experience or perceive.
Heterogenous nouns (buildings, parks, trucks, lamps, etc.) are almost always countable, though there are exceptions (like ‘luggage’). Homogenous nouns, on the other hand, could be countable or uncountable.
Are the boundaries of a noun clearly defined and within your perspective? Can you see or feel around its edges? Could you draw its outline or photograph its silhouette? If so, it’s probably a countable noun.
If on the other hand the boundaries are either difficult to fathom, it’s probably an uncountable noun.
If you ask your students to draw water, most will depict it with waves. It might come up to a shore, but often the water extends beyond two or three edges of the paper. There’s not a clear limit to our generic understanding of water. If a student were to draw water in a circle or rectangle instead, they’d be drawing a pool, pond, or puddle, all of which are countable nouns.
This is the reason that some nouns – like food and materials – can be either countable or uncountable. In contexts when we can perceive an instance of a thing in its entirety, it’s countable. But in contexts in which we refer to the substance of a thing without defined limits, it’s uncountable.