Universal grinder

"Universal sorter" and "Universal packager" redirect here. For other uses of "sorter", see Sorter (disambiguation). For other uses of "packager", see Packager (disambiguation).
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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.[1]

Related concepts, the universal sorter and universal packager refer to similar processes that allow mass nouns to be used as count nouns.

  1. ^ Pelletier, F. Jeffry: Non-singular reference: some preliminaries. In Philosophia Vol. 5 No. 4 Pp. 451–465, October 1975.