Free Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter Page B

to cultural practices. Ethnosyntax might therefore also be called cross-cultural pragmatics or comparative pragmatics .
Language and Linguistic Structure
    Language loops in and around itself. The final -s in the third person singular present-tense English verbs, for example, she eat s , does not refer to the extralinguistic world and can only be understood on its own terms. Quite a bit of the linguistic structure discussed in Chapter 1 forms the ways language loops around itself. This means that not all of language coincides with all of the culture in and through which it is looped, nor even do grammatical features necessarily align with any objective reality. To live in and through a particular language is to take the perspectives one's predecessors have worked out in their recurrent interactions.
    The speakers of some languages, like English, split their perspectives on the way they conceive of all objects in the universe and make a distinction between nouns they can count and nouns they conceive of in terms of mass. Count nouns are concrete things like books and chairs , and abstract things like jobs and governments that get pluralized when there is more than one. Mass nouns are concrete things such as water , snow , and salt or abstract things such as damage and hope . English speakers can refer to five books and three chairs, and talk about holding down two jobs or the way one government follows another. When it comes to water , snow , and salt , however, English speakers do not refer to two waters (unless they are waiting tables and using short hand for how many glasses of water they need to get to their customers) or one snow (unless they are referring to snow collectively, as in ‘the first snow of the season’) or one damage. Mass nouns require a way to be talked about, a way to be construed: a drop of water, a flake of snow, a grain of salt, a pat of butter, a dollop of cream, and so forth. When you're estimating relative sizes of count nouns, and the question arises: How many books are there? The answer could be either: very many or very few. When you're estimating relative sizes of mass nouns, the question becomes: How much hope is there? And the answer is now either: very much or very little.
    Speakers of other languages make no distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, and view all objects in the universe as mass nouns. In Vietnamese, when a noun is particularized by being counted or used with a demonstrative, such as this and that , a numeral classifier (CL) is grammatically necessary. Examples include:
một cái áo
‘one’ (CL) ‘shirt’
‘one shirt’
hai quyển sách
‘two’ (CL) ‘book’
‘two books.’
    Note that the nouns shirt and book require no plural morpheme, and be aware that without the numeral classifier, it is difficult for a Vietnamese person to understand what you are talking about. When learning a language with numeral classifiers, Chinese for instance, your teacher may tell you that if you don't know the proper classifier or have forgotten it, it is better to insert the most common classifier gè into whatever you are counting than nothing at all in order to be understood. In addition to Vietnamese and Chinese, other numeral classifier languages include, among others, Japanese, Korean, and Malay. These languages tend to have between 20 and 200 classifiers, and they almost always involve the size and/or shapes of the noun particularized.
    Here, we note that English has an incipient classifier system, with piece of as the default classifier that particularizes many mass nouns such as luggage , gum , gossip , news , furniture , and pie . 5 An example of an obligatory classifier in English exists for the restricted set of mass nouns golf , applause , violence , government measures (e.g., taxes , funding cuts , etc.), and drinks (in the sense of group participation). When particularized by a number, the indefinite article