A Study On The Countability Of English Nouns From A Prototype Perspective

As an important and pervasive grammatical phenomenon in English, the countability ofnouns has been paid much attention by linguists, philosophers and psychologists, and thefields which it involves become broader and broader. English nouns consist of proper nounsand common nouns, and common nouns are made up of count nouns and mass nouns. Thereare a lot of researches involving the discrimination of count-mass nouns which have beendone. And it can be judged and defined by various methods which are not unified up to now.The countability of English nouns is related to two categories: one is the count noun category,and the other is mass noun category. We have found that the two categories are prototypicalcategories which have their prototypical members and peripheral members. Prototype theoryconsiders that the boundary of a category is uncertain and fuzzy, and the boundary has thecharacteristics of openness. Because the objective world bears the attributes of unlimitedness,continuity and endlessness, and most of the things are a kind of continuum, so it is impossibleto make a clear dividing line between count nouns and mass nouns. After having done a lot ofresearch, the countability of nouns is closely linked to humans’ cognition, and it is the fruit ofthe interaction of humans and the objective world, its construal is dynamic. It has somegeneral characteristics, but also has some personalities, i.e. the uncertainty.We have done a lot of research on distinction of count-mass nouns. However, there arefew discussions about the mechanism underlying countability. This thesis holds that prototypetheory is an effective and useful theory by which people can understand the world goingthrough a process from appearance to essence.For the reasons mentioned above, this thesis tries to adopt prototype theory to illustratethe cognitive mechanism of prototypical features of countability within the frame work ofCognitive Linguistics.According to prototype theory, we know that categorization is human’s basic cognitivecompetence, and humans’ cognition possesses creativity and imagination, so does categories.Why does humans’ cognition possess creativity and imagination, because humans use the metonymies and metaphors in their languages. Due to the metonymic mechanism, the twodomains can be mapped with each other, so we can easily understand that mass nouns can beviewed as count nouns, and count nouns can also be viewed as mass nouns. That is to say, thethings in a category are a kind of continuum. We can hardly make a clear-out line betweencategories. Owing to metaphoric mechanism, we can easily understand the countability ofabstract nouns. Due to human’s subjective initiative, prototype theory holds that the attributesof a category are not universal, but specific, so we can understand that each language has itsown construal of nouns’ countability. And the history of countability in English also tells usthe categories are mostly acquired by humans’ bodily experience.