I think Adam's corpus-related idea makes perfectly good sense, but as another angle you might also consider checking whether the noun is a descendant of the synset <br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">substance (the real physical matter of which a person or thing consists)
<br><br></div>in WordNet. <br><br> Philip<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 19, 2007 7:00 PM, Adam Kilgarriff <<a href="mailto:adam@lexmasterclass.com">adam@lexmasterclass.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>Scott,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This is an interesting task to do from a corpus:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>take a large English corpus</div>
<div>for each of the most frequent N nouns of English, find:</div>
<div> overall frequency</div>
<div> how often in singular</div>
<div> how often in plural</div>
<div> how often with each of </div>
<div> a/an</div>
<div> some + singular</div>
<div> some + plural</div>
<div> numbers</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It won't be too hard to identify, from this data, what nouns are count-only and which mass-only, and of course there'll be lots in between (including lots where polysemy is part of the issue)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>We've been addressing related questions, and support this kind of exploration, in the Sketch Engine (<a href="http://www.sketchengine.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.sketchengine.co.uk</a>) </div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Adam</div>
<div><br><br> </div>
<div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><span class="gmail_quote">On 19/12/2007, <b class="gmail_sendername">scott crossley</b> <<a href="mailto:sacrossley@gmail.com" target="_blank">sacrossley@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
</span>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">Dear Corpora List Members,<br><br>I am trying to locate an electronic list of mass and count nouns in English. I am looking at the development of hypernymic relations in L2 learners of English and would like to compute the amount of mass and count nouns used by L2 learners as they relate to basic level categories and superordinate categories in language use.
<br><br>Any help would be appreciated!<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Scott Crossley, Ph.D.<br>Linguistics/TESOL<br><br>Department of English<br>Mississippi State University<br><a href="http://www.msstate.edu/dept/english/esl.html" target="_blank">
http://www.msstate.edu/dept/english/esl.html</a><br>(662) 325-2355<br><br>Institute for Intelligent Systems<br>University of Memphis<br><a href="http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/iis/" target="_blank">
http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/iis/ </a><br></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>Corpora mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no" target="_blank">Corpora@uib.no
</a><br><a href="http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora" target="_blank">http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora</a><br><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>
-- <br>================================================<br><font color="#888888">Adam Kilgarriff <a href="http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk</a>
<br>Lexical Computing Ltd
<a href="http://www.sketchengine.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.sketchengine.co.uk</a><br>Lexicography MasterClass Ltd <a href="http://www.lexmasterclass.com" target="_blank">http://www.lexmasterclass.com</a><br>
Universities of Leeds and Sussex
<a href="mailto:adam@lexmasterclass.com" target="_blank">adam@lexmasterclass.com</a><br>================================================
</font><br>_______________________________________________<br>Corpora mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no">Corpora@uib.no</a><br><a href="http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora" target="_blank">http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
</a><br><br></blockquote></div><br>