1

Fixture is defined in the LEXICO Dictionary as:

A piece of equipment or furniture which is fixed in position in a building or vehicle.

Here're a couple examples from the dictionary:

Cathedral ceilings, antique light fixtures and furniture that looked as though it had come straight from the twenties.

During assembly, the glass is first positioned in a fixture with several sensors around the sunroof.

So, fixture seems to be a count-noun, albeit usually used in the plural.

But as its definition indicates, fixture is similar in meaning to such mass nouns as equipment and furniture in that it encompasses different objects with different shapes and functions that can be subsumed under a single category. And I thought this kind of special meaning was the very reason for treating equipment and furniture as a mass noun, so I was wondering how fixture is treated as not a mass noun but a count noun.

Is there anything with fixture that distinguishes it from the equipment/ furniture types of mass nouns that makes it a count noun?

Community
  • 1
listeneva
  • 1,447
  • 1
    It says *a piece of* equipment or furniture... – Jim Jan 11 '20 at 02:36
  • 7
    Because English. – Hot Licks Jan 11 '20 at 02:36
  • @Jim I know, but that doesn't answer my question. Also note that that's a very poor way of defining the noun, because a fixture, but not fixture, is "a piece of equipment or furniture..." – listeneva Jan 11 '20 at 07:05
  • 2
    @listeneva - A fixture is *a* thing that hold *something. It is inherently singular while furniture and equipment are inherently plural. A light fixture holds a lightbulb. A work fixture holds a piece of work. I think it is not usually used in the plural any more than apple/apples. I ate an apple, I bought some apples. I installed a light fixture, I replaced all my bathroom fixtures. As far as definitions go, when I look up tree* I get: *a woody perennial plant. When I look up house* I get: *a building for human habitation. They all start with a*. – Jim Jan 11 '20 at 19:48
  • @Jim Just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean they're doing it right. – listeneva Jan 12 '20 at 00:13
  • And you truly believe that’s the case here? – Jim Jan 12 '20 at 01:22
  • @Jim If tree is "a woody perennial plant" does the tree mean "the a woody perennial plant"? That's why https://www.collinsdictionary.com/ defines it as follows: "A tree is a tall plant that has a hard trunk, branches, and leaves," not "Tree is a tall plant that has a hard trunk, branches, and leaves." BTW, the dictionary defines fixture as follows: 1. COUNTABLE NOUN [usually plural] "Fixtures are pieces of furniture or equipment, for example baths and sinks, which are fixed inside a house or other building and which stay there if you move." – listeneva Jan 12 '20 at 01:51
  • @Jim What I really don't understand about what you said, though, is your statement "furniture and equipment are inherently plural." If they are plural, how come they're not treated as such? You can't say The furniture are wearing out. or The equipment are wearing out.. – listeneva Jan 12 '20 at 01:57
  • What I meant is when you say “the furniture” you are usually referring collectively to multiple pieces of furniture not just to one piece. – Jim Jan 12 '20 at 02:03
  • @Jim I'm afraid you're confusing collective nouns such as police with mass nouns such as furniture. The police can refer collectively to a plurality of police officers, but never to one police officer. But the furniture definitely can refer to a single piece of furniture. – listeneva Jan 12 '20 at 06:47
  • When someone says they're moving the furniture in a room, it's not referring to a single piece but to more than one piece even if furniture doesn't end with the plural suffix "s". BUT the bathroom fixture (s) and the bathroom fixtures (p) In English you shouldn't say "The reception furnitures" that is not how native speakers speak. – Mari-Lou A Jan 15 '20 at 08:52
  • @Mari-LouA When that someone has only one piece of furniture in the room, the furniture refers to one piece. So, it's context dependent, not an inherent thing in the noun itself. – listeneva Jan 15 '20 at 11:07
  • 3
    If there's only a single piece, it would seem to me, to be more logical to call it by its full name, e.g. armchair, sofa, bed, cupboard etc. – Mari-Lou A Jan 15 '20 at 11:54
  • Though there is thankfully a large overlap, there is not a total match between countness of a noun and etic countability of the referent. 'The seven soldiers were sent home. So were the police. In all, ten were sent home.' – Edwin Ashworth Jan 15 '20 at 19:15
  • I'm lost. Is OP saying that "I see one furniture in the room" is correct? Or is he saying that it's wrong and asking for some sort of justification for the fact that we say "One fixture" but we do not say "One furniture"? – Chaim Jan 15 '20 at 19:24
  • 1
    @Chaim The latter is what I'm saying. – listeneva Jan 16 '20 at 02:05
  • 1
    @EdwinAshworth You've lost me. Could you please rephrase your comment in a layman's term? – listeneva Jan 16 '20 at 02:09
  • The 'countness' (/non-countness) of a usage is determined by whether a numeral or equivalent (eg 'a dozen', 'several', but not quantifiers) may be inserted. So with '(a) The soldiers went to the seaside ==> (b) The twelve soldiers went to the seaside' we have a count usage. And with 'We need a new light for the front room ==> We need 3/several new lights for the front room'. But with 'A blinding light filled the clearing' =/=> Two blinding lights filled the clearing' ... – Edwin Ashworth Jan 16 '20 at 16:47
  • and 'She/they smiled at us with an unusual friendliness' =/=> She/they smiled at us with several/3 unusual friendlinesses' we have non-count usages. //// 'The furniture is stacked on that platform' shows a non-count usage of 'furniture', though someone not bothered about the peculiarities of English would possibly count the individual items of furniture.... But usually, count usages correspond to countable items. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 16 '20 at 16:47
  • @EdwinAshworth AFAIK, dictionaries categorize "light" in "A blinding light filled the clearing" not as a non-count noun but as a count noun or a singular noun. And I'd think 'a singular noun' is subsumed under a count noun rather than a non-count noun. – listeneva Jan 17 '20 at 00:45
  • 2
    I suspect this is a non-question but it occurs to be that furniture comes from to furnish, which implies obtaining / arranging a number of items in a room etc, whereas fixture comes from to affix, which means to take something and attach it in a more or less permanent manner, so that it becomes part of the property - so the verbs from which these nouns derive differ in that one is essentially collective and the other is essentially individual. It's not surprising if that difference finds its way through to the nominalised forms. – JD2000 Jan 17 '20 at 13:19
  • @listeneva But CGEL outranks all dictionaries on points of grammar. And the test it gives for a count usage in a sentence is 'May a numeral or equivalent (we're not talking quantifier, like 'some', 'less', 'a lot of' here) be acceptably inserted into this usage?' The possibility of using the indefinite article with a non-count usage has been covered on ELU a long time ago (see my answer at 'a blinding light' 'blinding sunlight' 'a blinding sunlight). – Edwin Ashworth Jan 17 '20 at 16:18
  • @listeneva And it's always best to check. CED gives the example 'a bright light' as being an example of a non-count ([U]) usage. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 17 '20 at 16:25

2 Answers2

4

On pages 214-5 of the Google book "The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology" the authors Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag classify "fixture" to be a word:

"with lexicalized meanings (that) are likelier than non-lexicalized forms to have only the count reading."

Lexicalization or lexicalisation is defined in linguistics and British English (since this is coming from the Oxford Dictionary) as

to form (a word or lexeme) or (of a word or lexeme) to be formed from constituent morphemes, words, or lexemes, as to form cannot from can and not

In the context of "Count vs mass interpretation", a generalization is made between words that have been thoroughly lexicalized as more commonly used as COUNT nouns. In contrast, those that have NOT been lexicalized (or have less lexicalization) are more commonly used as NON-COUNT nouns.

Here is an image of what I found in Google Books

![The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

Furniture in contrast in the same book is described as a non-count because it is a substance

"treated as undifferentiated (milk, oxygen), abstractions (truth), or aggregates of items, either uniform (rice) or variable (furniture) whose boundaries are not conceptually salient."

Here is an image from pages 124-5 of the same text in Google Books:

The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

Karlomanio
  • 1,291
  • 7
  • 13
  • 2
    This gives the well-supported answer “because fixture has been lexicalized” but that immediately begs the question “why has it been lexicalized?”. I suspect all roads lead to the flippant answer given by @Hot Licks - “Because English”! – Orbital Aussie Jan 15 '20 at 23:04
  • @OrbitalAussie Before you go down that road, I don't understand what the book means by "lexicalization". The book seems to be saying that furniture is less (or un-)lexicalized. Does that mean that furniture is not an English word or less of an English word than fixture? Maybe Karlomanio could elaborate on this matter. – listeneva Jan 16 '20 at 02:00
  • FYI, this is what I've found about 'lexicalization': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicalization – listeneva Jan 16 '20 at 02:01
  • 1
    @listeneva I defined a lexeme as per British English and Linguistics, which I believe it is referring to. Hope that helps. It may muddy the water some, but basically fix- is one lexeme and -ture is another. – Karlomanio Jan 16 '20 at 15:33
  • No; you're confusing lexeme with morpheme. // To get rid of extensive yellow highlighting in a highish-end image manipulator, I convert to greyscale, then use 'adjust brightness/contrast/ intensity' to optimise clarity, then see if 'directional sharpen' gets us back to near-original. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 16 '20 at 17:15
  • @EdwinAshworth Lexicalization can be the process of "form(ing) from constituent ....morphemes, words, or lexemes, as to form cannot from can and not." As I stated above. In this case, the morphemes being "fix-" and "-ture" – Karlomanio Jan 16 '20 at 18:11
  • No. You said "... basically 'fix-' is one lexeme and '-ture' is another" in your comment. This time, I've taken a screen-shot. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 16 '20 at 18:27
  • I said combining those two are a form of lexicalization. I did not say whether "fix-" and "-ture" were morphemes or lexemes. – Karlomanio Jan 16 '20 at 18:31
  • @EdwinAshworth I'm not sure it is important as to who did what or who is "right" and who is "wrong" as to whether we come to a common understanding. – Karlomanio Jan 16 '20 at 18:39
  • It's generally considered helpful on ELU not to submit errors. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 16 '20 at 19:54
  • 1
    @Karlomanio So you're saying that fixture is formed from fix- and -ture. Now, can you not argue that furniture is formed from furni- and -ture? – listeneva Jan 17 '20 at 00:54
  • 1
    You seem to be under the impression that lexicalize were chiefly Brittish English. It is not exclusively Brittish. It's just technical jargon. – vectory Jan 17 '20 at 04:10
  • @listeneva You raise a good point, but I think the argument here might be that furni- is not a (perfect) morpheme for the object it is representing- i.e. Furnishing being more of a form to meet this rule- i.e. furnishings. I added a part that explains how furniture is considered non-count. – Karlomanio Jan 17 '20 at 16:40
  • @vectory Sorry for the confusion. That's not what I meant, but I can see how it left that impression though. I was quoting the source for the dictionary I was using for the word lexicalize. The dictionary.com entry shows this as being "BRITISH DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS FOR LEXICALIZE." I believe it is also a general linguistics term and I delineate it separately from the British English term. The dictionary entry states that it is a "linguistics" term. – Karlomanio Jan 17 '20 at 17:00
  • 1
    @listeneva One more point. These are all generalizations. Not anything specifically right or wrong. The Oxford dictionary uses terms as "somewhat likelier" indicating that even though you may have a thoroughly lexicalized word, it may not follow the rule they just described. There are always exceptions in every language that don't follow the generalizations (i.e. "because English"). This book and this answer only provides a framework, not a black and white yes-no answer. That is what I interpreted the questioner to want. – Karlomanio Jan 17 '20 at 17:08
-2

Probably influenced by Fixstar "fixed star" (cp Ger Fixstern; En fixpoint vs floating point). A single fixed star is of course useless. The mythological importance of this should not be understated, if *ster- (cp e.g. Ger starr "rigid") pretty much means fixed for a couple milenia now, though it can't be conclusively linked to *Hestr- "star".

Other than that, French shows a lot of plural usage for furnitures as well as denoting deverbal abstracta, which might be confusing if they elide the plural inflection regularly, as much as article inflection in colloquial speach (l'furtniture[s]), though I I'm not sure that was the case when English borrowed it from Middle French.

vectory
  • 800
  • 2
    I'd suggest you proof-read your post. – Hot Licks Jan 17 '20 at 00:52
  • Aye, it's terrible, and typing on mobile is only a weak excuse. But that's the least problem with this post. – vectory Jan 17 '20 at 01:04
  • Who said those were the same suffixes? I didn't. Frankly, I don't even care. Given the observation that the countability of a word can change over time, why would the original/historical form of a suffix even matter in answering the question? – listeneva Jan 17 '20 at 01:22
  • Oh, OK, had to change my answer because I hadn't properly read the question before – vectory Jan 17 '20 at 03:59