What is "universal grinder"

n. (context linguistics English) A mechanism whereby countable nouns are made uncountable.

In linguistics, the term "universal grinder" refers to an 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.

The idea of the "universal grinder" is that while count nouns usually denote whole, distinct objects (such as "a dog", "two dogs"), the equivalent mass noun connotes a non-distinct amount of whatever constitutes these objects, especially that it is unclear how many (even if an integral number at all) of these objects it constitutes. Because of this change of meaning, sentences made using the "universal grinder" can sometimes appear unappealing, for example "I went to the site of the traffic accident, and there was dog lying all over the road."

While the "universal grinder" can be used in many Indo-European languages, most particularly English and Dutch, it does not apply in all languages; there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the morphology and semantics of the mass/count and singular/plural distinctions. For example, bare count nouns in Mandarin Chinese do not receive mass interpretations: a sentence such as Qiáng-shang dōu shì gǒu can only be interpreted as 'There are dogs all over the wall,' not as 'There is dog all over the wall.'