English nouns
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme. English nouns primarily function as the heads of noun phrases, which prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. These phrases are the only English phrases whose structure includes determinatives and predeterminatives, which add abstract-specifying meaning such as definiteness and proximity. Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions, characteristics, relations in space, and just about anything at all. Taken together, these features separate English nouns from other lexical categories such as adjectives and verbs.
In this article English nouns include English pronouns but not English determiners.
Subtypes
English nouns are classified into three major subtypes: common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns, each with its own typical syntactic behaviour.Proper nouns
Proper nouns are a class of words such as December, Canada, Leah, and Johnson that occur within noun phrases that are proper names, though not all proper names contain proper nouns. "The central cases of proper names", according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "are expressions which have been conventionally adopted as the name of a particular entity." A prominent category of proper names is of those assigned to particular people or animals. Others include particular places and institutions. While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is a word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun.Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form. For example, we typically expect Michigan but not *Michigans, and the Philippines but not *Philippine. Proper nouns also differ from common nouns in that they typically lack either a determinative or determinative contrast. For instance, we typically expect Michigan but not *a Michigan, and though the Bahamas includes the determinative the, the determinative cannot normally be varied. Finally, proper nouns differ from common nouns in that they typically cannot be modified by restrictive modifiers.
In English, the features that distinguish proper nouns from common nouns do not necessarily apply in the rare situations in which proper nouns lack unique denotation. For example, London typically refers to a unique place, but someone trying to disambiguate between two places named London might pluralize it, add a determinative, or add a restrictive modifier.
Pronouns
English pronouns are a closed category of words that have a variety of features distinguishing them from common and proper nouns. Unlike common nouns, pronouns are mostly deictic and anaphoric pro-forms. In the clause I like you, for instance, I and you are deictic in that their meanings can only be understood in relation to the context of the utterance. In the clause Tell Anne I want to talk to her, on the other hand, her is anaphoric in that the pronoun derives its meaning from its antecedent.Also unlike common nouns, English pronouns show distinctions in case, person and gender. Though both common nouns and pronouns show number distinction in English, they do so differently: common nouns tend to take an inflectional ending to mark plurals, but pronouns typically do not. English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take dependents. For instance, while common nouns can often be preceded by a determinative, pronouns cannot.
In English conversation, pronouns are roughly as frequent as other nouns. In fiction, pronouns are about one third of all nouns, and in news and academic English, less than ten percent of nouns.
Common nouns
Common nouns are defined as those that are neither proper nouns nor pronouns. They are the most numerous and the most frequently used in English.Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner. These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass. The count and non-count distinction also affects what other determiners can occur with the nouns: singular count nouns can occur with a but not some while non-count nouns can occur with some but not a. Many common nouns have both count and non-count senses. For example, beer has a non-count sense in she was drinking beer but a count sense in she drank another beer.
Morphology
Inflection
A defining property of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number. In addition to number, English pronouns can inflect for case, a feature shared by some NPs but not common nouns themselves.Common nouns
Common nouns in English have little inflectional morphology, inflecting only for number. In modern English writing, the plural is usually formed with the –s morpheme, which can be realized phonetically as /s/, /z/, or /əz/. For example, the singular nouns cat, dog, and bush are pluralized as cats, dogs '', and bushes, respectively. Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation, adding –en, or making no change at all. English has also borrowed the plural forms of loanwords from various languages, such as Latin and Greek.Some varieties of English use different methods of marking the plural, many of which fall into one of three patterns. First, the plural morpheme may be absent when another word already indicates that the noun is plural. In the clause two girl just left, for instance, speakers of some varieties would not use the plural morpheme on the noun girl because the determiner two already marks the noun phrase as plural. Dem, which is derived from them, is often used without the plural morpheme, as in dem book. This method of plural marking occurs in Gullah and Caribbean English among other varieties. Second, the plural morpheme may be absent specifically in noun phrases denoting weights and measures but not in other situations. Thus, some varieties may produce noun phrases like ten mile while still using the plural morpheme in other contexts. This method of plural marking for weights and measures occurs in certain rural varieties of Southern U.S. English. Third, irregular plural nouns may be regularized and use the –s morpheme. This may happen when the plural is not otherwise marked, when the plural is typically marked with a morpheme other than –s, or when the plural is typically formed through vowel mutation. For plurals marked by vowel mutation, some varieties may double mark the plural. Regularization of plural marking occurs in several Englishes, including African-American English.
Traditional grammars suggest that English nouns can also take genitive case endings, as in the –
- 's paws]
- 's paws]
Pronouns
† Rare.
†† Interrogative only. Relative whose is not possible.
Derivational (for common nouns)
The most common noun-forming suffixes in English are -tion, -ism, -ity, and -ness. For example, the verb activate + -tion becomes the noun activation. English nouns can also be formed by conversion and compounding.There are also many prefixes that can be attached to English nouns to change their meaning. A small list of examples include anti-, bi-, dis-, hyper-, mega-, non-, & re-.
Semantics of nouns and noun phrases
English noun phrases typically inherit the denotation of the head noun. On top of this, they may have many other semantic characteristics including definiteness, reference, specificity, number, quantification, gender, and person.Denotation and reference
English nouns prototypically denote entities. The denotation of an expression is its literal meaning, such as those meanings listed within monolingual dictionaries. For example, one of the things that apple denotes is "the fleshy, usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually cultivated tree of the rose family".English noun phrases can also refer to entities. A noun phrase is referential if it is used to pick out an entity that is distinguished by properties other those inherent in the meaning of the noun phrase itself. For instance, the noun phrase his dog in Sam found his dog picks out a particular entity that is distinguishable by properties not expressed in the meaning of dog.
Not all noun phrases refer. In fact, some kinds of noun phrases are inherently non-referential. These include negative, interrogative, and bare role noun phrases as well as noun phrases with either or each functioning as a determinative. The underlined NPs in the following examples do not refer:
- Negative: Nobody came.
- Interrogative: Who likes ice cream?
- Bare role: She was elected president.
- Either as determinative: Either team might win the game.
- Each as determinative: She interviewed each child in turn.
- Dummy pronoun: It's raining.
- Existential there: ''There's a problem.''