한국언어과학회

This paper reexamines the countability of English nouns based on the notion of embodied cognition. It is argued that both the prototype approach and the dynamic construal approach exemplify the embodiment view in terms of categorization in which the former can serve as the conceptual basis whereas the latter can function as a psychological basis. From a prototype approach, there are middle places between count and non-count nouns, so the boundary between the two subcategories is fuzzy. From a dynamic construal approach, it is suggested that there is no stable category and that we have only the contextual count nouns and non-count nouns. It is also proposed that nouns in this context tend to undergo a process of decategorization from the original categories and be recategorized into ad-hoc categories. The variability and flexibility of nouns as the semantic unit exhibit the contextuality and dynamics of human conceptualization by adopting the means of metaphor or metonymy. In addition, the interconversion of countability of nouns is also influenced by the domain of instantiation of the nouns, maximal and immediate scopes of human visual domains, and specificity and schematicity of the nouns.