Presenting "Plural Mass" Participants

Martin & Rose (2007: 163-4):

There are a few ways of introducing plural participants (things or people). One way is to use the plural with no determiner:

In the upper abdomen were twenty-five wounds.
These wounds indicated that different weapons were used to stab him…

For presenting participants, there is the plural of ‘a’, namely ‘some’:

they had some friends over
he had some milk for Helena

English uses the indefinite plural ‘some’ with things that can be counted like friends, and things that can’t like milk. Things like milk are ‘masses’. We can package them and then count the packages (two bottles of milk), but we can’t count a ‘mass’ (*two milks).

However with plural things or with masses we also have the option of presenting participants without ‘a’ or ‘the’:

I put garden shears through his neck
They were shot and massacred with AK47s
they poured acid on his face.

Plural things are presented with the ending ‘-s’, while plural masses are presented with neither an ending nor a determiner.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is reference in the sense of ideational denotation only: a nominal group realising a participant. The nominal group twenty-five wounds does not include a reference item whose identity requires recovering elsewhere.

[2] Again, this is reference in the sense of ideational denotation only: a nominal group realising a participant. The non-specific determiner some does not serve as a reference item, because it does not specify a recoverable identity.

[3] To be clear, this concerns the deictic function of non-specific determiners, which do not serve as reference items. Cf Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 368):

[4] Again, this is reference in the sense of ideational denotation only: a nominal group realising a participant.

[5] To be clear, here Martin & Rose inform their readers, who are necessarily literate in English, the most common way to mark plural number in English nouns. (Cf. also mice, geese, men, children, loaves, appendices etc.)

[6] Here, having informed the reader that "we can’t count a ‘mass’ (*two milks)", Martin & Rose nevertheless count them ("plural masses"). To be clear, mass nouns, like plural nouns, can be "presented" with a determiner, as the authors' own example some milk demonstrates. Again, this is deixis, not reference. Cf Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 369):