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The Indefinite Article as a Signal of the Countable Use of Uncountable Nouns
Hradecká, Markéta ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The Indefinite Article as a Signal of Countable Use of Uncountable Nouns The present thesis deals with the role of premodification in the countability of nouns. More specifically, it concentrates on the dual class nouns, i.e. nous that are used both countably and uncountably. The aim of the thesis is to determine whether the presence of premodification results in the countable use of dual class nouns. Also, the semantics of the premodifiers is taken into account. The theoretical part of the thesis summarizes information from grammar books and describes the category of countability. All of the types of nouns, i.e. countable, uncountable and dual class, are characterized. Semantic classification of adjectives is included, too, as adjectives are the most frequent noun class in terms of premodification. The empirical part of the thesis concentrates on the analysis of specific examples and aims to decide the impact of the presence of premodification on the dual class nouns. For these purposes, three nouns were chosen (difference, interest, language) and fifty instances of each noun were excerpted from the British national corpus. Each of the instances was assessed in terms of countability, in the case of difference the semantics of premodifiers was determined (this step was eliminated in the case of the...
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