Is the word “weekend” a collective noun?
No, in the same way that “week” is not a collective noun. A collective noun is a singular form which refers to a group, often of indefinite size (flock, crowd), or to a mass of something (water), again often of indefinite size (I don’t know if the size thing is part of the definition).
“Weekend” happens to refer to a block of time that includes more than one day, but so does “week.” “Day” refers to 24 hours, “house” refers to several rooms, “keyboard” includes dozens of keys. But they are not collective nouns.
Water is not infinite.
[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
“house” refers to several rooms.QUOTE]
House refers to several rooms? A house can’t have one room?
He said indefinite, not infinite.
I’ve heard these called “countable” nouns. You can’t have 4 grass, but you can have 4 blades of grass. Grass is uncountable, but blades are countable.
Weekend is countable (& thus non-collective), because you can say, “There are usually 4 weekends in a month.”
“Count nouns” or “mass nouns.”
How about “garbage can” as a collective noun? 
You didn’t mean “compound noun”, did you? Because if so, I think one could make the argument that it is.
It’s a compound noun because it’s composed of two nouns: week and end. What it is not, however, is a collective or noncount noun.
Well, technically, in the two word phrase that it derives from–week end–“week” acts as an adjective. Right?
Obviously in some semantic sense, “week” is describing “end”. However, this is not a sufficient condition for calling something an “adjective” in any theory of grammar that I’m acquainted with. Parts of speech are usually defined in terms of typical syntactic properties. If “week” were really an adjective here, you might expect to see:
comparative and superlative forms:
“this is the weeker / more week end”
“this is the weekest / more week end”
modification:
“this is a very week end”
predicative uses:
“this end is week”
You can’t have 4 grass for the same reason you can’t have 4 dog. That’s because English plurals usually take a terminal ‘s’. But you certainly can have 4 grasses.
There is no problem with counting grasses. Trust me on this, I’ve done it more times than I care to remember.
In this case you’re referring to “grass” as a type of grass. Just like you don’t refer to “peoples” in the sense of plural, or more than one person. But you can use “peoples” to refer to different nationalities and ethnicities.
If you say, “I have many grasses in my yard,” you imply that you have several types of grass. But, “I have a lot of grass in my yard,” implies a large quantity of grass. In this case, we are referring to quantity with noncount nouns. It’s a tricky topic and difficult to explain to ELL students.
Typically, a true collective noun is a word for a group taken as a unit. The interesting thing is that British and American use differs on when it may be pluralized.
“The committee is agreed on this recommendation.”
but
Am: “The committee is divided on what to recommend.”
Br: “The committee are divided on what to recommend.”
One extremely obvious one: “The United States is a country…” is an obvious example of a plural-form noun functioning as a single unit. Likewise, “The 2008 Olympics is scheduled to be hosted by Beijing, China.”
I thought “Olympics” was short for “Olympic Games”, and therefore plural? At least this one guy agrees (a few questions from the bottom, and he addresses group nouns elsewhere on the page.
What about “team?” In the US, it’s “the team is.” But in at least one British song lyric it’s “…the football team are drinkin’…”
The way I figure it, if you can make the noun plural, then it’s still singular for verb conjigation purposes.
How wrong am I?
You’re not wrong. It’s a collective noun. It’s just that as Polycarp explained, there are differences when you cross the proverbial Pond in how some collective nouns are used. I think there are sometimes even differences between different dialects on either side.
Or maybe that should be you are wrong if you want to just toggle willy-nilly between singular and plural constructions within a particular speech community, in the sense that it “sounds wrong” to U.S. ears when someone says the team are.
I would also point out that the “singular collective noun + are” construction is used frequently in music magazines. For instance, “Coldplay are…” is written all the time. I was told somewhere in high school that this is the technically correct way to do it. It’s just not very common except in formal writing, at least in my experience.
Ok, thanks. It’ll still sound wrong, but I won’t criticize.
It seems to me then that most nouns are non-count nouns, and grass stil isn’t special.
“I have many cakes on the menu” implies that I have several types of cake. But, “I have a lot of cake on the menu” implies a large quantity of cake, thus "cake is a non-count noun.
“My pet has a lot of wolves in his pedigree” implies that you have several different wolves. But, “He has a lot of wolf in his pedigree” implies a large proportion of wolf. And of course we could switch the word wolf for dog, and thus dog is also a non-count noun.
“There are many people in that bed” cf. “There is a lot of person in that bed”
I’m still not getting this. What nouns actually aren’t non-count nouns in exactly the same way as grass? Not trying to nit-pick but it seems like almost any noun at all is a non-count noun when used in this fashion, and that those that can’t be used in this fashion are the exceptions.