grinding (n.)

In SEMANTICS, a term sometimes used in analyzing the process of SENSE extension, notably that which creates UNCOUNTABLE NOUNS from COUNT nouns. The metaphor is that of a universal grinder machine which would turn a chicken, for example, into the mass noun chicken. The analysis of ground nouns aims to establish which types of noun allow conceptual grinding in a language (e.g. animal meat), and the extent to which languages employ different GRAMMATICAL means to encode grinding phenomena.