word usage - Is there a list and/or a rule for nouns that must be pluralized when not preceded by a definite article or adjective?

I recently came upon the following sentence:

Their job is to create advertisement.

As a native speaker of American English, this sentence sounded really odd to me, so I ran it through Google's Ngram, discovering that the phrase "create advertisement" was not found (for either American or British English) as you can see from the image below:

I've also done some searches of Google web pages and have come to the same conclusion. So, I have further concluded that "advertisement" must be pluralized when not preceded by a definite article or adjective. (If I am incorrect in this assumption, please let me know.)

I wanted to explain to those who had created the sentence above (non-native speakers, presumably), from a grammatical or usage standpoint, why it wasn't correct, but my initial searches have not yielded anything worthwhile on this topic. I always feel as if I am somehow falling short on explaining the nuances of the English language whenever I have to fall back on the line, "Well, it just doesn't sound natural to me."

I've visited web pages that list words that are only plural and others that discuss when and when not to use an article with a singular or plural noun and still others that delve into the topic of count vs. non-count nouns, but, thus far, I have not seen anything that discusses nouns that need to be plural when not preceded by a definite article or adjective. I'm assuming "advertisement" isn't the only such word and that, if there are others like it, some sort of rule about their usage has evolved.

Thank you for any insight you can provide, either through your own knowledge of the English language, good logic, and/or references to other material.

Answer

I actually think the answer is something you mentioned, count nouns vs. mass nouns.

Consider:

1. Their job is to create sand.


2. *Their job is to create sands.


3. *Their job is to create a sand.

And:

1. *Their job is to create beach.


2. Their job is to create beaches.


3. Their job is to create a beach.

"Sand" is a mass noun, meaning it doesn't generally take indefinite articles, and you don't generally pluralize it. I couldn't give the fundamental reason for this; any such explanation would probably just beg the question (e.g., in English we don't put the adjective before the noun for any logical reason; whatever reason we could give would be given in reverse order by an equally logical speaker of Spanish).

"Beach" on the other hand, is a count noun. In your example usage, it must take either an indefinite article, or be pluralized.

(Note that both words can be used with a definite article in your example, but the meaning is slightly different - it would refer to a previously defined quantity of sand, or a previously defined beach:

1. Their job is to create the sand.


2. Their job is to create the beach.)

Also, you can often use a "unit word" (which is itself a count noun) to convert a mass noun into a related count noun. For "sand" this word is "grain":

1. Their job is to create grains of sand.

For "cattle" it's "head"; for water it could be "drop"; etc.

Finally, I should mention that you can pluralize mass nouns, or use them with an indefinite article, but that generally signals an implicit shift of meaning. A plural for a mass noun X may mean something like, "different kinds of X". In the (somewhat cliched) phrase, "sands of time", for example, the idea is that time produces shifts in the world, much as the wind does to the sand(s) of different deserts you might visit.

So, the final answer to the question of why the example sentence isn't ok comes down to irreducible rules about articles and mass nouns in English.