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I have recently came across two sentences that feature the usage of singular nouns to generalise the statement as they follow.

"The presence of the gene predisposes a person to heart disease"

"Phrasal verbs simplify and enliven language in a very flexible way"

In the first sentence, according to GPT, heart disease is singular to deliver that the gene can make anyone vulnerable to any kind of heart disease. At the same time, instead of saying heart diseases, the use of the singluar noun gives an impression that the sentence is not going to talk about what specific heart diseases the gene triggers in the following sentences.

Pretty much the same, in the second example, GPT says language is singular to encompass various concepts related to the use of language such as grammar structure, way to express etc, whereas using the plural form indicates that the following is going to talk about how pharal verbs can be used in different languages.

Thank you for reading so far, and I would like to ask if what I stated above is correct and how can I understand the use of singular noun to better understand generalisation?

Thank you so much

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  • Just adding a comment to users out there, please be nice, even if the questioner mentions the AI bot by name, just replace it with the word "teacher" and you have a perfectly acceptable English language question.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jul 17 at 4:32
  • There are a few users who sternly believe that learners who ask AI questions about English grammar and meanings of words or phrases (etc.) should not post questions here. Crazy, I know.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jul 17 at 4:43
  • Cross-posting from ELU.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jul 17 at 7:32

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Neither heart disease nor language are being used as singular nouns, but as uncountable ones.

"Heart disease" refers to any number of medically distinct conditions, but in everyday English they're treated as a single thing. There's no rhetorical purpose to doing so, it's just the default. Of course we can also talk about different heart diseases if we really want to, but at that point we'd probably shift to more technical terms.

ChatGPT is approximately correct about the way uncountable nouns are used, if you ignore the fact that it called them singular. We can talk about language as a higher concept without referencing any individual languages. The difference between countable and uncountable nouns is a widely covered topic.

ChatGPT is not a recommended way to learn about English (or most things). It will be wildly wrong a significant portion of the time, and if you have to check every answer with us, why not just ask here in the first place?

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