Countability in the history of English: Evidence from grammars and dictionaries

Abstract

Since at least the mid twentieth century, countability has been a lively topic in many fields of linguistics as well as an important subject in the field of teaching English as a second/foreign language. Yet the development of this category in the history of English has been little researched and never comprehensively described. This paper looks at the current state of the descriptions of the emergence of this category in the history of English. It notes a possible connection between its prominent status in the descriptions of Present-Day English and of English as a global language (studied by many non-native learners as well as linguists). It maps the history of the description of the category in grammars and dictionaries from the fourteenth until the early twentieth century, and prepares the ground for a follow-up corpus-based research of the development of countability in English.