A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§2.2 Count and non-count nouns 85

Proper nouns characteristically function as the head of NPs serving as proper

names, names individually assigned to particular people, places, festivals, etc.

They also occur, derivatively, in other kinds of NP (cf. Let's listen to [some

Beethoven]).

Common nouns represent the default subclass, lacking the special properties of

pronouns and proper nouns.

2 Number and countability

Number is the name of the system contrasting singular and plural.
In the first instance, it applies to noun inflection: nouns typically have contrasting
singular and plural forms. Thus cat and cats are the singular and plural forms of the
noun cat, and so on.

2.1 Nouns with fixed number

Although most nouns have variable number, there are nevertheless many
that do not - nouns which are invariably singular or invariably plural.

(a) Singular-only nouns

Examples of nouns which have a singular form but no plural are given in [9]:

[9] i crockery, dross,footwear, harm, indebtedness, nonsense, perseverance

ii italics, linguistics, mumps, news, phonetics, physics

Those in [ii] look like plurals, but the final s is not in fact a plural marker, like that in
cats. This is evident from the fact that we say The news is good (not are), and so on.

(b) Plural-only nouns

Nouns with a plural form but no singular are illustrated in [10]:

[10] i alms, auspices, belongings, clothes, genitals, scissors, spoils, trousers

ii cattle, police, vermin

Those in [i] contain the plural suffix ·s, but it cannot be dropped to form a singular.
In most cases there is some fairly transparent connection to plurality in the ordinary
sense of "more than one": belongings denotes things that belong to someone,
clothes is a cover term for articles of clothing, while scissors and trousers denote
objects with two main parts. The nouns in [ii] have no inflectional marking of plu­
rality, but behave syntactically as plurals. Note, for example, that we say these
cattle, not this cattle; The police have arrived, not The police has arrived.

2.2 Count and non-count nouns

Closely related to the distinction between nouns of variable and invari­

able number is that between count nouns and non-count nouns. As the names