articles overview * COUNT/NONCOUNT

Count or Noncount? -- CHECK IT OUT YOURSELF!

A. COUNT/NONCOUNT meanings:

A
    air    
art
  baseball  
beauty
beer
business
B
    cake    
chance
chicken
crime
  democracy  
education
C
    evil    
  experience  
family
fear
fertilizer
film
D
    fish    
  friendship  
glass
history
life
light
E
    noise    
oil
paper
  responsibility  
school
science
F
      skill      
talk
time
truth
video
work

1. Use an online concordance (like COBUILD or VLC) to find examples of one of the words above used with a countable meaning. (Look for the word in these patterns -- ignore examples where your noun is not the "head noun."):

a/an/one ______
____________s
Copy two sentences here:

Add an original sentence of your own here:

2. Now find examples of your word used with a NONCOUNT meaning. (Get a concordance of your word .. but then you will have to look for examples that do not follow determiners -- remember that if there are modifiers before your noun, there might be a determiner before them.) :

Copy two sentences here:

Add an original sentence of your own here:


Back to the Concordance page
Go to the IEI Home Page

Ann Salzmann
Intensive English Institute
University of Illinois