Noun
In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.
In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category defined according to how its members combine with members of other lexical categories. The syntactic occurrence of nouns differs among languages.
In English, prototypical nouns are common nouns or proper nouns that can occur with determiners, articles and attributive adjectives, and can function as the head of a noun phrase. According to traditional and popular classification, pronouns are distinct from nouns, but in much modern theory they are considered a subclass of nouns. Every language has various linguistic and grammatical distinctions between nouns and verbs.
History
es were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun is one of the four main categories of words defined.The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma, referred to by Plato in the Cratylus, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax. The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom.
The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number. Because adjectives share these three grammatical categories, adjectives typically were placed in the same class as nouns.
Similarly, the Latin term nōmen includes both nouns and adjectives, as originally did the English word noun, the two types being distinguished as nouns substantive and nouns adjective.
Many European languages use a cognate of the word substantive as the basic term for noun. Nouns in the dictionaries of such languages are demarked by the abbreviation s. or sb. instead of n., which may be used for proper nouns or neuter nouns instead. In English, some modern authors use the word substantive to refer to a class that includes both nouns and noun phrases. It can also be used as a counterpart to attributive when distinguishing between a noun being used as the head of a Noun phrase and a noun being used as a noun adjunct. For example, the noun knee can be said to be used substantively in my knee hurts, but attributively in the patient needed knee replacement.
Examples
- The cat sat on the chair.
- Please hand in your assignments by the end of the week.
- Cleanliness is next to godliness.
- Plato was an influential philosopher in ancient Greece.
- Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit / The oldest sins the newest kind of ways? Henry IV Part 2, act 4 scene 5.
- the name
- *the baptise
- constant circulation
- *constant circulate
- a fright
- *an afraid
- terrible fright
- ''*terrible afraid''
Characterization and definition
Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties. Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc., but this manner of definition has been criticized as uninformative.
Several English nouns lack an intrinsic referent of their own: behalf, dint, and sake. Moreover, other parts of speech may have reference-like properties: the verbs to rain or to mother, or adjectives like red; and there is little difference between the adverb gleefully and the prepositional phrase with glee.
A functional approach defines a noun as a word that can be the head of a nominal phrase, i.e., a phrase with referential function, without needing to go through morphological transformation.
Classification
Nouns can have a number of different properties and are often sub-categorized based on various of these criteria, depending on their occurrence in a language. Nouns may be classified according to morphological properties such as which prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their relations in syntax – how they combine with other words and expressions of various types.Many such classifications are language-specific, given the obvious differences in syntax and morphology. In English for example, it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles, but this could not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.
Gender
In some languages common and proper nouns have grammatical gender, typically masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender of a noun will often require agreement in words that modify or are used along with it. In French for example, the singular form of the definite article is le for masculine nouns and la for feminine; adjectives and certain verb forms also change. Grammatical gender often correlates with the form of the noun and the inflection pattern it follows; for example, in both Italian and Romanian most nouns ending in -a are feminine. Gender can also correlate with the sex or social gender of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of nouns denoting people, though with exceptions.In Modern English, even common nouns like hen and princess and proper nouns like Alicia do not have grammatical gender, though they denote persons or animals of a specific sex. The gender of a pronoun must be appropriate for the item referred to: "The girl said the ring was from her new boyfriend, but he denied it was from him".
Proper and common nouns
A proper noun is a noun that represents a unique entity – as distinguished from common nouns, which describe a class of entities. In Modern English, most proper nouns – unlike most common nouns – are capitalized regardless of context, as are many of the forms that are derived from them.Countable nouns and mass nouns
Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or counting quantifiers, and can take an indefinite article such as a or an. Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.Mass nouns or uncountable ''nouns differ from count nouns in precisely that respect: they cannot take plurals or combine with number words or the above type of quantifiers. For example, the forms a furniture and three furnitures are not used – even though pieces of furniture can be counted. The distinction between mass and count nouns does not primarily concern their corresponding referents but more how the nouns present those entities.
Many nouns have both countable and uncountable uses; for example, soda'' is countable in "give me three sodas", but uncountable in "he likes soda".
Collective nouns
Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are treated in their morphology and syntax as singular – refer to groups consisting of more than one individual or entity. Examples include committee, government, and police. In English these nouns may be followed by a singular or a plural verb and referred to by a singular or plural pronoun, the singular being generally preferred when referring to the body as a unit and the plural often being preferred, especially in British English, when emphasizing the individual members. Examples of acceptable and unacceptable use given by Gowers in Plain Words include:Concrete nouns and abstract nouns
Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can, in principle at least, be observed by at least one of the senses, as items supposed to exist in the physical world. Abstract nouns, on the other hand, refer to abstract objects: ideas or concepts.Some nouns have both concrete and abstract meanings: art usually refers to something abstract, but it can also refer to a concrete item. A noun might have a literal and also a figurative meaning: "a brass key" and "the key to success"; "a block in the pipe" and "a mental block". Similarly, some abstract nouns have developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots.
Many abstract nouns in English are formed by adding a suffix to adjectives or verbs.