Noun

For other uses, see Noun (disambiguation).
Examples
  • The cat sat on the mat.
  • 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

A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. In the following, an asterisk (*) in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.

  1. the name (name is a noun: can co-occur with a definite article the.)
  2. *the baptise (baptise is a verb: cannot co-occur with a definite article.)
  3. constant circulation (circulation is a noun: can co-occur with the attributive adjective constant.)
  4. *constant circulate (circulate is a verb: cannot co-occur with the attributive adjective constant.)
  5. a fright (fright is a noun: can co-occur with the indefinite article a.)
  6. *an afraid (afraid is an adjective: cannot co-occur with the article a.)
  7. terrible fright (The noun fright can co-occur with the adjective terrible.)
  8. *terrible afraid (The adjective afraid cannot co-occur with the adjective terrible.)

A noun (Latin: nōmen, "name"[1]) is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.[2][note 1] Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.[3]

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of words defined.[4]

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name".[5] The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.

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 were originally placed in the same class as nouns. For example, in The Art of Grammar, words of adjectival type are largely contained in the subclass of ónoma described as paragōgón (plural paragōgá),[6] meaning "derived".[7] Similarly, the Latin nōmen included both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did the English word noun, the two types being distinguished as nouns substantive and nouns adjective. (The word nominal is now sometimes used to denote a class that includes both nouns and adjectives.)

Many European languages use a cognate of the word substantive as the basic term for noun (for example, Spanish sustantivo, "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 instead. In English, some modern authors use the word substantive to refer to a class that includes both nouns (single words) and noun phrases (multiword units, also called noun equivalents).[8] It can also be used as a counterpart to attributive when distinguishing between a noun being used as the head (main word) 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.

Definitions of nouns

Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they are subject (classed by gender, inflected for case and number). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since nouns do not have the same categories in all languages.

Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties (their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.[9]

There have been offered several examples of English-language nouns which do not have any reference: drought, enjoyment, finesse, behalf (as found in on behalf of), dint (in dint of), and sake (for the sake of).[10][11][12]

Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other lexical categories) in terms of their formal properties. These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their syntax – how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types. Such definitions may nonetheless still be language-specific, since syntax as well as morphology varies between languages. For example, in English it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as stated at the start of this article), but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.

There have been several attempts, sometimes controversial, to produce a stricter definition of nouns on a semantic basis. Some of these are referenced in the Further reading section below.

Gender

Main article: Grammatical gender

In some languages, nouns are assigned to genders, such as masculine, feminine and neuter (or other combinations). The gender of a noun (as well as its number and case, where applicable) will often entail agreement in words that modify or are related to it. For example, in French, the singular form of the definite article is le with masculine nouns and la with feminines; adjectives and certain verb forms also change (with the addition of -e with feminines). Grammatical gender often correlates with the form of the noun and the inflection pattern it follows; for example, in both Italian and Russian most nouns ending -a are feminine. Gender can also correlate with the sex of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of nouns denoting people (and sometimes animals). Nouns do not have gender in Modern English, although many of them denote people or animals of a specific sex.

Classification of nouns

Proper nouns and common nouns

Main article: Proper noun

A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing unique entities (such as Earth, India, Jupiter, Harry, or BMW), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, animal, planet, person or car).[13]

Countable and uncountable nouns

Main articles: Count noun and Mass noun

Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or counting quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article such as a or an (in languages which have such articles). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.

Mass nouns or uncountable (or non-count) 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, it is not possible to refer to a furniture or three furnitures. This is true even though the pieces of furniture comprising furniture could be counted. Thus the distinction between mass and count nouns should not be made in terms of what sorts of things the nouns refer to, but rather in terms of how the nouns present these entities.[14][15]

Many nouns have both countable and uncountable uses; for example, beer is countable in "give me three beers", but uncountable in "he likes beer".

Collective nouns

Main article: Collective noun

Collective nouns are nouns that refer to groups consisting of more than one individual or entity, even when they are inflected for the singular. Examples include committee, herd, and school (of fish). These nouns have slightly different grammatical properties than other nouns. For example, the noun phrases that they head can serve as the subject of a collective predicate, even when they are inflected for.

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns

Further information: Physical body and Abstract object

Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can, in principle at least, be observed by at least one of the senses (for instance, chair, apple, Janet or atom). Abstract nouns, on the other hand, refer to abstract objects; that is, ideas or concepts (such as justice or hatred). While this distinction is sometimes exclusive, some nouns have multiple senses, including both concrete and abstract ones; consider, for example, the noun art, which usually refers to a concept (e.g., Art is an important element of human culture) but which can refer to a specific artwork in certain contexts (e.g., I put my daughter's art up on the fridge).

Some abstract nouns developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots. These include drawback, fraction, holdout, and uptake. Similarly, some nouns have both abstract and concrete senses, with the latter having developed by figurative extension from the former. These include view, filter, structure, and key.

In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming suffixes (-ness, -ity, -ion) to adjectives or verbs. Examples are happiness (from the adjective happy), circulation (from the verb circulate) and serenity (from the adjective serene).

Noun phrases

Main article: Noun phrase

A noun phrase is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word (nominal) optionally accompanied by modifiers such as determiners and adjectives. A noun phrase functions within a clause or sentence in a role such as that of subject, object, or complement of a verb or preposition. For example, in the sentence "The black cat sat on a dear friend of mine", the noun phrase the black cat serves as the subject, and the noun phrase a dear friend of mine serves as the complement of the preposition on.

Pronouns

Main article: Pronoun

Nouns and noun phrases can typically be replaced by pronouns, such as he, it, which, and those, in order to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons. For example, in the sentence Janeth thought that he was weird, the word he is a pronoun standing in place of the name of the person in question. The English word one can replace parts of noun phrases, and it sometimes stands in for a noun. An example is given below:

John's car is newer than the one that Bill has.

But one can also stand in for bigger sub parts of a noun phrase. For example, in the following example, one can stand in for new car.

This new car is cheaper than that one.

Nominalization

Main article: Nominalization

Nominalization is a process whereby a word that belongs to another part of speech comes to be used as a noun. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns referring to people who have the characteristics denoted by the adjective. This sometimes happens in English as well, as in the following examples:

This legislation will have the most impact on the poor.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
The Socialist International is a worldwide association of political parties.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Example nouns for:

References

  1. ↑ nōmen. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary on Perseus Project.
  2. ↑ "Noun". Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online). Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. 2014.
  3. ↑ Loos, Eugene E., et al. 2003. Glossary of linguistic terms: What is a noun?
  4. ↑ Bimal Krishna Matilal, The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language, 1990 (Chapter 3)
  5. ↑ nōmen. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary on Perseus Project.; ὄνομα. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
  6. ↑ Dionysius Thrax. τέχνη γραμματική (Art of Grammar), section ιβ' (10b): περὶ ὀνόματος (On the noun). Bibliotheca Augustana. εἴδη δὲ παραγώνων ἐστὶν ἑπτά· πατρωνυμικόν, κτητικόν, συγκριτικόν, ὑπερθετικόν, ὑποκοριστικόν, παρώνυμον, ῥηματικόν. "There are seven types of derived [nouns]: patronymic, possessive, comparative, superlative, diminutive, derived from a noun, [and] verbal."
  7. ↑ παραγωγός
  8. ↑ Chicago Manual of Style, "5.10: Noun-equivalents and substantives", The Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press.
  9. ↑ Jackendoff, Ray (2002). "§5.5 Semantics as a generative system". Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution (PDF). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-827012-7.
  10. ↑ pages 218, 225 and elsewhere in Quine, Willard Van Orman (2013) [1960 print]. "7 Ontic Decision". Word and Object. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 215–254.
  11. ↑ Reimer, Marga (May 20, 2009). Zaita, Edward N., ed. "Reference §3.4 Non-Referring Expressions". Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition). Retrieved 15 July 2014.
  12. ↑ English nouns with restricted non-referential interpretation in bare noun phrases
  13. ↑ Lester, Mark; Larry Beason (2005). The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage. McGraw-Hill. p. 4. ISBN 0-07-144133-6.
  14. ↑ Krifka, Manfred. 1989. "Nominal Reference, Temporal Constitution and Quantification in Event Semantics". In R. Bartsch, J. van Benthem, P. von Emde Boas (eds.), Semantics and Contextual Expression, Dordrecht: Foris Publication.
  15. ↑ Borer, Hagit. 2005. In Name Only. Structuring Sense, Volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further reading

For definitions of nouns based on the concept of "identity criteria":

For more on identity criteria:

For the concept that nouns are "prototypically referential":

For an attempt to relate the concepts of identity criteria and prototypical referentiality:

Understanding nouns in the context of WordNet:

External links

Look up noun in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.