Countability Of English Nouns: A Grammar-pragmatics Interface Approach

Nouns are one of the key grammatical categories in most natural languages, and countability is an important characteristic of nouns in English. Meanwhile, the countability of English nouns in use is also a complex and common linguistic phenomenon, thus it attracts a considerable amount of attention of researchers. Generally, they have made great efforts to explain the countability of English nouns from different perspectives, especially from the morpho-syntactic, semantic and cognitive linguistic perspectives. The previous studies have made some remarkable achievements, but they still have their own limitations. First of all, there are many studies on countability of English nouns, but there is few study on countability from a grammar-pragmatics interface approach. Secondly, most studies explore the grammatical or semantic features of countability of nouns only in isolated words or sentences, but neglect the behaviors of countability in discourse and the pragmatic constraints behind the phenomenon, thus they overlook the integrative analysis of countability of nouns in the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic level.On the basis of the previous studies, the present study aims to account for the countability of English nouns in use from the grammar-pragmatics interface perspective, especially the interconversion of count nouns and noncount nouns. This study demonstrates that the nature of countability of nouns in use is the result of the interaction of grammar and pragmatics. Countability of nouns is an abstract grammatical category. When nouns are used in contexts of situation, they must be realized into two specific linguistic forms of count nouns or noncount nouns, which is closely related to the interaction of grammar and pragmatics. And the pragmatic choices of count nouns or noncount nouns are realizations of countability of nouns, and at the same time, it proves that countability of nouns serves as the resource device to realize pragmatics in contexts of situation. In addition, we analyze the different types of pragmatic constraints that affect the countability of English nouns in use. And also, we testify the assumption that countability of English nouns in use can be taken as a continuum which exhibits the degree of countability, with individual nouns standing at the most countable end, material nouns at the least countable end, and abstract nouns whose countability is the most unstable standing in between.Studies on countability of English nouns in use from the grammar-pragmatics interface perspective will greatly help to guide English language teaching and learning, and promote language learners’ pragmatic awareness behind linguistic constructions, thus reducing their pragmatic errors on countability of English nouns in use.