Count and Noncount Nouns

On educational TV, I heard this sentence: “Women have been trying to go through childbirth with little or no drugs.”

Little . . . drugs? At first, that didn’t sound right.

Adjectives such as “little” and “much” normally describe noncount (also called uncountable) nouns. Noncount nouns name substances that do not typically come in units, substances such as flour, grass, or advice.

But the noun drug is a count noun: we can have a drug, two drugs, few drugs, or many drugs. We don’t normally say little drugs or much drugs.

The doctor who spoke on educational TV did not mean that women wanted to replace six or seven drugs with one or two. Instead, the doctor meant that women were choosing no drugs or only low doses. Thus the doctor treated drugs as a noncount noun. She could have said, “Women have been trying to go through childbirth with either no drugs or smaller doses.”

The lesson here is that English treats nouns differently, depending on whether they describe countable or uncountable things:

Count nouns
A car, one car, the car, few cars, fewer cars, many cars, more cars
An item, one item, the item, few items, fewer items, many items, more items

Noncount nouns
Advice, little advice, less advice, much advice, more advice
Flour, little flour, less flour, much flour, more flour
Grass, little grass, less grass, much grass, more grass

If we must segment an uncountable substance, we build a phrase such as “one piece of advice” or “one species of grass” or add a clause such as “a flour that many bakers use.”

If you are unsure whether a noun is count or noncount, consult an international dictionary of English such as Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary. Every noun there is identified with a C for countable or U for uncountable.

A College Grammar Course Online

If you go to

www.ccc.commnet.edu/sensen/index.html

you will find the home page of a college-level online course that teaches English sentence structure.

Learn the parts of a sentence and how you can make them work to express your ideas.

This free course, called Sentence Sense, is designed for use with Netscape, but also works on other browser and hardware configurations. It requires Javascript.

Dangling Modifiers

Can you tell why English teachers criticize the following sentences for their dangling modifiers?

1. Calling themselves a "creative hub," each photo page displays a variety of HTML codes needed to post it elsewhere.

2. Once used only in space, consumers can now install photo voltaic cells to generate their own electricity.

3. Unlike Demetrios Island, goats have been Stratos’s only source of income.

4. Using a phenomenological approach, the participants completed an audiotaped, unstructured, nondirective interview.

When a sentence begins with a dangling modifier, and no comma follows the modifier, that sentence can baffle readers:

5. When searching through the console log node TZ9a6 was found to be missing.