Universal grinder
In linguistics, universal grinder is the idea that in some languages, most count nouns can be used as if they were mass nouns, which causes a slight change in their meaning. The term "universal grinder" was first used in print by F. Jeffry Pelletier in 1975, after a personal suggestion by David Lewis. Related concepts, the universal sorter and universal packager refer to similar processes that allow mass nouns to be used as count nouns. Universal grinder The idea of the "universal grinder" is that, while count nouns usually denote whole, distinct objects (such as a steak, two steaks), the equivalent mass noun connotes a non-distinct quantity of whatever constitutes these objects (some steak). The universal grinder suggests that most count nouns can be used as mass nouns, when the distinct thing named by the noun will be thought of as a general quantity. While the "universal grinder" can be used in many Indo-European languages, most particularly English and Dutch, it does not apply in all languages; there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the morphology and semantics of the mass/count and singular/plural distinctions. For example, bare count nouns in Mandarin Chinese do not receive mass interpretations: a sentence such as