History of the word noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen ‘name’)^[1] is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.^{[2][note 1]}

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 between languages. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase. «As far as we know, every language makes a grammatical distinction that looks like a noun verb distinction.»^[3]

History [edit]

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 are placed in the same class as nouns.

Similarly, the Latin nōmen includes both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did the English word noun, the two types being distinguished as nouns substantive and nouns adjective (or substantive nouns and adjective nouns, or short substantives and adjectives). (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 or neuter 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).^[6] 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.

Examples[edit]

• 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.

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

• the name (name is a noun: can co-occur with a definite article the)
• *the baptise (baptise is a verb: cannot co-occur with a definite article)
• constant circulation (circulation is a noun: can co-occur with the attributive adjective constant)
• *constant circulate (circulate is a verb: cannot co-occur with the attributive adjective constant)
• a fright (fright is a noun: can co-occur with the indefinite article a)
• *an afraid (afraid is an adjective: cannot co-occur with the article a)
• terrible fright (the noun fright can co-occur with the adjective terrible)
• *terrible afraid (the adjective afraid cannot co-occur with the adjective terrible)

Definitions[edit]

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.^[7]

There are several instances 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).^[8][9][10] Moreover, there may be a relationship similar to reference in the case of other parts of speech: the verbs to rain or to mother; many adjectives, like red; and there is little difference between the adverb gleefully and the noun-based phrase with glee.^{[note 2]}

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.

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.^[11][12]

Classification[edit]

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.

Gender[edit]

In some languages, genders are assigned to nouns, such as masculine, feminine and neuter. 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 for masculine nouns and la for feminine; adjectives and certain verb forms also change (with the addition of -e for feminine). 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 arguably do not have gender in Modern English, although many of them denote people or animals of a specific sex (or social gender), and pronouns that refer to nouns must take the appropriate gender for that noun. (The girl lost her spectacles.)

Proper and common nouns[edit]

A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing unique entities (such as India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, or Pequod), as distinguished from common nouns, which describe a class of entities (such as country, animal, planet, person or ship).^[13]

Countable nouns and mass nouns[edit]

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, soda is countable in «give me three sodas», but uncountable in «he likes soda».

Collective nouns[edit]

Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are inflected for the 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.^[16] Examples of acceptable and unacceptable use given by Gowers in Plain Words include:^[16]

«A committee was appointed to consider this subject.» (singular)

«The committee were unable to agree.» (plural)

* «The committee were of one mind when I sat in on them.» (unacceptable use of plural)

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns[edit]

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). Different schools of philosophy and sciences may question the assumption, but, for the most part, people agree to the existence of something (e.g., a rock, a tree, universe). 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: 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 a suffix (-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).

Alienable vs. inalienable nouns[edit]

Some languages, such as the Awa language spoken in Papua New Guinea,^[17] refer to nouns differently, depending on how ownership is being given for the given noun. This can be broken into two categories: alienable possession and inalienable possession. An alienably possessed noun is something that can exist independent of a possessor: for example ‘tree’ can be possessed (‘Lucy’s tree’) but need not be (‘the tree’), and likewise for ‘shirt’ (‘Mike’s shirt’, ‘that shirt’) and ‘roads’ (‘London’s roads’, ‘those roads’) . Inalienablly possessed nouns, on the other hand, refer to something that does not exist independently of a possessor; this includes kin terms such as ‘father’, body-part nouns such as ‘shadow’ or ‘hair’, and part-whole nouns such as ‘top’ and ‘bottom’.

Noun phrases[edit]

A noun phrase is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like words (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.

Nouns in relation to other word classes[edit]

Pronouns[edit]

Nouns and noun phrases can typically be replaced by pronouns, such as he, it, she, they, these which, and those, in order to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons. For example, in the sentence Gareth thought that he was weird, the word «he» is a pronoun standing in place of the person’s name. The 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 larger 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[edit]

Nominalization is a process whereby a word that belongs to another part of speech comes to be used as a noun. This can be a way to create new nouns, or to use other words in ways that resemble nouns. 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 powerful.

The Socialist International is a worldwide association of political parties.

See also[edit]

• Description
• Grammatical case
• Phi features
• Punctuation
• Reference

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

• Lester, Mark; Beason, Larry (2005). The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-144133-6.
• Borer, Hagit (2005). In Name Only. Structuring Sense. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gowers, Ernest (2014). Gowers, Rebecca (ed.). Plain Words. Particular. ISBN 978-0-141-97553-5.

Further reading[edit]

• Laycock, Henry (2005). «Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns», Draft version of entry in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Oxford: Elsevier.

For definitions of nouns based on the concept of «identity criteria»:

• Geach, Peter. 1962. Reference and Generality. Cornell University Press.

For more on identity criteria:

• Gupta, Anil. 1980, The logic of common nouns. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

For the concept that nouns are «prototypically referential»:

• Croft, William. 1993. «A noun is a noun is a noun — or is it? Some reflections on the universality of semantics». Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Joshua S. Guenter, Barbara A. Kaiser and Cheryl C. Zoll, 369–80. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

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

• Baker, Mark. 2003, Lexical Categories: verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

External links[edit]

• Nouns – Nouns described by The Idioms Dictionary.

Old English

As it has been mentioned in Lecture 14, the Noun had the following
categories in OE:

Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl).

Case – Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat),
Accusative (Acc).

Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N):

• Originally (in PG) it was a semantic division
  (he/she/it – associated with the lexical meaning of a noun), but
  in OE this principle did not work any more (e.g. wīf
  (wife) = Neuter);

• In OE the nouns started to grouped into genders according to the
  suffix:

  • -þu (F) – e.g. lenζþu
    (length);

  • -ere (M) – e.g. fiscere
    (fisher).

System of Declensions

Though
the stem-suffixes merged with the root, declensions were still
existent in OE and were based
on the former IE stem-suffixes:

a-stem – the most numerous declension (M, N):

Case	Masculine	Neuter
Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nom, Acc	fisc	fiscas	dēor	dēor!
Gen	fisces	fisca	dēores	dēora
Dat	fisce	fiscum	dēore	dēorum

Traces of a-stem in Modern English:

• -es (M,
  Sg, Gen) 
  ‘s
  (student’s book)
  – Possessive Case;

• -as (M,
  Pl, Nom) 
  -(e)s
  (watches, books)
  – plural ending
  for the majority of nouns;

• —
  (N, Pl, Nom) 
  zero ending (deer,
  sheep) – homogeneous
  Sg and Pl.

n-stem (M, N, F):

Case	Masculine
Singular	Plural
Nom	nama	naman
Gen	naman	namena
Dat	naman	namum
Acc	naman	naman

Traces of n-stem in Modern English:

• -an (M,
  Pl, Nom) 
  -en
  (oxen, children, brethren)
  – irregular plural ending.

root-stem – never
had stem-suffix, words consisted of just a root
(M, F):

Case	Masculine
Singular	Plural
Nom, Acc	fōt	fēt
Gen	fotes	fōta
Dat	fēt	fōtum

Traces of n-stem in Modern English:

• root-sound interchange (M,
  Pl, Nom) 
  root-sound interchange (men,
  geese, mice) – irregular
  Plural.

Middle English

Most changes occurred to the Noun
in ME.

System of Declensions

In ME the declensions disappeared due
to the reduction of endings. As far as
the Case endings were reduced to one or two, there remained no
distinction between the Case forms of different declensions and there
was no necessity any more to distinguish these declensions.

Gender

The Gender in OE was not supported semantically.
It was only a classifying feature for the declensions and as
far as the declensions disappeared
there was no necessity to preserve the Gender. It disappeared by the
11^th
– 12^th
c.

Number

The
quantity of the Number endings was also reduced as
far as the declensions disappeared.
The markers of the Plural became more
uniform
(-s,
-en, root-sound interchange).
The preference of the consonantal
endings
can be explained by the fact that the vowels were more apt to change
and reduction then the consonants that in general proved to be more
stable.

Case

The Case
system was contracted in ME due
to the reduction of endings.
As far as the Case endings were reduced to one or two, there remained
no distinction between the Case forms and there was no necessity any
more to distinguish 4 Cases:

OE Cases	ME Cases	Peculiarities
Nominative  Dative  Accusative 	Common	 (Subject) (former Nom)  (direct Object) (former Acc)  (prepositional/indirect Object) (former Dat)
Genitive 	Genitive(Possessive)	The usage of the Genitive became more limited. In Singular it was marked by -‘s. In the 17th – 18th c. the apostrophe (‘) started to be used in Pl, Gen as far as the plural Genitive ending was lost but some distinction between the Common and the Genitive case in Plural should be preserved.

Causes for Decay of Case System:

1. Influence of the Scandinavian
   Dialects that were grammatically
   simpler in comparison with OE Dialects and this influence led to the
   minimization of grammar.

2. Phonetic reductionof final unstressed syllables
   (inflections).

Consequences of Case System Decay:

1. The number of prepositions
   started to grow
   to help to replace the former Case forms.

2. As far as there was no distinctions between the
   Cases, the distinction between the Subject and the Object of a
   sentence was lost 
   fixed word order
   appeared (The Subject almost always took the first place and was
   followed by the Object).

H/w:

1. After reading the material of the lecture, use
the glossary of “A Reader in the History of English” by Е.К.
Щука and analyse
the following nouns: ēaζan, sunu,
daζas, fæder,
brēðer. Plan of analysis:

• initial form;

• type of declension;

• Gender;

• Case;

• Number;

• Modern English equivalent;

• etymology;

• translation.

2. Find all the nouns in the abstract from
“Beowulf” on p. 8 in “A Reader in the History of English” by
Е.К. Щука
and analyse them
according to the plan given above.

3. Find the proofs of the changes in the Noun in
ME in the abstract from the “Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey
Chaucer (lines 1-14) on p. 33-34 in “A Reader in the History of
English” by Е.К.
Щука.

Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]

• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #
• #

Examples

The dog slept. That is John. This is the Alton police station. The pay of the job is high. Go there on Monday. I like pumpkins.

A noun is a kind of word (see part of speech) that is usually the name of something such as a person, place, thing, quality, or idea. In English, nouns can be singular or plural.

Nouns often need a word called an article or determiner (like the or that). These words usually do not go with other kinds of words like verbs or adverbs. (For example, people do not say «I will the go to school» because go is a verb.) Adjectives can also describe nouns. In English, there are more nouns than any other kind of word.

Every language in the world has nouns, but they are not always used in the same ways. They also can have different properties in different languages. For example, in some other languages, nouns do not change for singular and plural, and sometimes there is no word for the.

Some examples of nouns in English are: time, people, way, year, government, day, world, life, work, part, number, house, system, company, end, party, information.

[change] The history of the word noun

The word ‘noun’ comes from the Latin nomen meaning «name.» Words like nouns were described in early days by the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax.

[change] Uses of nouns

In English sentences, nouns can be used as a subject, object, or complement. They often come after prepositions, as the ‘object of preposition’.

Nouns can sometimes describe other nouns (such as a soccer ball). When they do this, they are called modifiers.

There are also verb forms that can be used in the same way as nouns (such as ‘I like running.) These are called verbals or verbal nouns, and include participles (which can also be adjectives) and infinitives.

[change] Kinds of nouns and how they are ordered

Nouns are ordered into common nouns, and proper nouns. There are also pronouns. These have commonly been considered a different part of speech from nouns, but in the past some grammars have included them as nouns^[1] as do many modern linguists^[2].

[change] Proper nouns

A proper noun (also called proper name) is a name given to individual people, places, companies, or brands. Some examples of proper nouns are: London, John, God, October, Mozart, Saturday, Coke, Mr. Brown, Atlantic Ocean

Proper nouns begin with an upper case (capital) letter in English and many other languages that use the Roman alphabet. (However, in German, all nouns begin with an upper case letter.) The word «I» is really a pronoun, although it is capitalized in English, like a proper noun.

Some common nouns (see below) can also be used as proper nouns. For example, someone might be named ‘Tiger Smith’ — even though he is not a tiger or a smith.

[change] Common nouns

Common nouns are all other nouns that are not proper nouns. Sometimes the same word can be either a common noun or a proper noun, depending on how it is used; for example:

• there can be many gods, but there is only one God.
• there can be many internets (two or more networks connected together), but the largest internet in the world is the Internet.

[change] Number and countability

In English and many other languages, nouns have ‘number’. But some nouns are only singular (such as furniture, physics) and others are only plural (such as clothes, police). Also, some nouns are ‘countable’ (they can be counted, for example, one piece, two pieces) but others are not (for example, we do not say one furniture, two furnitures).

[change] Possessives

Nouns are words for things, and since things can be possessed, nouns can also change to show possession in grammar. In English, we usually add an apostrophe and an s to nouns to make them possessive, or sometimes just an apostrophe when there is already an s at the end, like this:

• This is Sam. This is Sam’s cat.
• The woman’s hair is long.
• There are three cats. The cats’ mother is sleeping.

[change] How adjectives become nouns

Most adjectives become nouns by adding the suffix ness. Example: Take the adjective ‘natural’, add ‘ness’ to get ‘naturalness’, a noun. To see a list of 100 adjectives used in Basic English, click here

[change] Other pages

• Name

[change] References

English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English noun, from Anglo-Norman noun, non, nom, from Latin nōmen (“name; noun”). The grammatical sense in Latin was a semantic loan from Koine Greek ὄνομα (ónoma). Doublet of name and nomen.

Pronunciation[edit]

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /naʊn/
• (Southern American English, MLE) IPA^(key): /næːn/

• Audio (US-Inland North)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -aʊn

Noun[edit]

noun (plural nouns)

1. (grammar, narrow sense) A word that functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as person, animal, place, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality, or idea; one of the basic parts of speech in many languages, including English.
2. (grammar, now rare, broad sense) Either a word that can be used to refer to a person, animal, place, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality or idea, or a word that modifies or describes a previous word or its referent; a substantive or adjective, sometimes also including other parts of speech such as numeral or pronoun.

   • 1753, Thomas Martin, An Explanation of the Accidence and Grammar To the End of the Syntax in which The Grounds of each Rule in the Syntax are laid down in the plainest Manner. Compiled By way of Question and Answer, For the Use of Schools., London, page 1:

     Q. What is a Noun? A. The Name of a Thing. Q. How many Sorts of Nouns are there? […] A. A Noun Substantive, and a Noun Adjective.

   • 1786, Signor Veneroni, The Complete Italian Master; Containing The best and easiest Rules for attaining that Language, London, page 6:

     A Noun is a word which serves to name and distinguish some thing; […]. There are two sorts of nouns; one is called a noun substantive, and the other a noun adjective.

   • 1852, Leonhard Schmitz, Elementary Latin grammar, Edinburgh, page 123:

     The first part of a compound word is either a noun (substantive, adjective, or numeral), an adverb, or a preposition, and in a very few cases a verb.

   • 1856, R. G. Latham, Logic in its application to language, London, page 224:

     Finally, there are many who limit the parts of speech to the noun, the verb, and the particle; referring to the first, the substantive, the adjective, and the pronoun (including the article), to the second the participle, to the third the remainder.

   • 1956, Herbert Weir Smyth & Gordon M. Messing, “189. Parts of Speech”, in Greek Grammar, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, page 44:

     Greek has the following parts of speech: substantives, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles. In this Grammar noun is used to include both the substantive and the adjective.

   • 1894, B. L. Gildersleeve & G. Lodge, Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, Dover, published 2008, page 9:

     The Parts of Speech are the Noun (Substantive and Adjective), the Pronoun, the Verb, and the Particles (Adverb, Preposition, and Conjunction)[.]

   • 1993, Arthur Anthony Macdonell, A Vedic Grammar For Students, First Indian edition, Delhi, page 283:

     The parts of which the sentence may consist are either inflected words: the noun (substantive and adjective) and the verb, the participle which shares the nature of both, and the pronoun; or uninflected words: prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions.

3. (computing) An object within a user interface to which a certain action or transformation (i.e., verb) is applied.

   • 1992, Brad A. Myers, David C. Smith, & Bruce Horn, chapter 19, in Languages for Developing User Interfaces:

     Nouns are the data; verbs are the data transformations, and therefore verbs represent much of the complexity of systems.

   • 2000, Jeff Raskin, The Humane Interface, page 59:

     You choose either (1) the verb (change font) first and then select the noun (the paragraph) to which the verb should apply or (2) the noun first and then apply the verb.

   • 2005, Barbara J. Grosz, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, volume 149, number 4:

     Thus, in essence, the mouse provides a capability for picking among a set of nouns (for instance, the file to which to apply some action) and verbs (such as «edit» or «insert»)

Usage notes[edit]

• (narrow sense) In English (and in many other languages), a noun can serve as the subject or object of a verb. For example, the English words table and computer are nouns. See Wikipedia’s article “Parts of speech”.

Synonyms[edit]

• name, nameword
• (sensu stricto) noun substantive, substantive noun, substantive, naming word

Hyponyms[edit]

See Thesaurus:noun

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

• nominal

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

• countable

Verb[edit]

noun (third-person singular simple present nouns, present participle nouning, simple past and past participle nouned)

1. (transitive) To convert a word to a noun.
   • 1974, The Modern Schoolman, page 144:

     What is not clear is how the nouning of verbs supports Simon’s assumed correspondence between mechanical designing and intentional human responses. Is it the very nouning of verbs which indicates that the above correspondence exists?

   • 1992, Lewis Acrelius Froman, Language and Power: Books III, IV, and V:

     For example, that females are different from but equal to males is oxymoronic by virtue of the nouned status of female and male as kinds of persons.

   • 2000, Andrew J. DuBrin, The complete idiot’s guide to leadership:

     However, too much nouning makes you sound bureaucratic, immature, and verbally challenged. Top executives convert far fewer nouns into verbs than do workers at lower levels.

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

(converting into or using as another part of speech:)

• adjectivize/adjectivise, adjective, adjectify
• adverbialize/adverbialise, (rare) adverb
• nominalize/nominalise, substantivize/substantivise, noun, (rare) nounify, (very rare) substantive
• verbalize/verbalise, (colloquial) verb

References[edit]

• noun on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Further reading[edit]

• noun at OneLook Dictionary Search

Anagrams[edit]

• non-U

Chuukese[edit]

Determiner[edit]

noun

1. third person singular possessive; his, hers, its (used with a special class of objects including living things)
2. son of, daughter of

[edit]

Middle English[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

• none, nown, nowne, noune

Etymology[edit]

From Anglo-Norman noun, non, nom, from Latin nōmen, a semantic loan from Koine Greek ὄνομα (ónoma). Doublet of name.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /nuːn/

Noun[edit]

noun (plural nounes)

1. (grammar) noun (part of speech; a category of words including substantives or nouns in the strict sense and adjectives)
2. An appellation.

Hyponyms[edit]

(grammar):

• noun substantyf
  • noun abstract
  • noune collectyf, nown collectif
  • nowne appellatiue
• noun adiectyf

Descendants[edit]

• English: noun

References[edit]

• “nǒun(e, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-05-03.

Occitan[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

• non

Etymology[edit]

From Latin non.

Adverb[edit]

noun

1. (Mistralian) no

Old French[edit]

Noun[edit]

noun m (oblique plural nouns, nominative singular nouns, nominative plural noun)

1. Alternative form of nom

Examples

The cat sat on the mat. Please hand in your assignments by the end of the week. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. George Washington was the first president of the United States of America. Please complete this assignment with black or blue pen only, and keep your eyes on your own paper. 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. the name (name is a noun: can co-occur with a definite article the.) *the baptize (baptize is a verb: cannot co-occur with a definite article.) constant circulation (circulation is a noun: can co-occur with the attributive adjective constant.) *constant circulate (circulate is a verb: cannot co-occur with the attributive adjective constant.) a fright (fright is a noun: can co-occur with the indefinite article a.) *an afraid (afraid is an adjective: cannot co-occur with the article a.) terrible fright (The noun fright can co-occur with the adjective terrible.) *terrible afraid (The adjective afraid cannot co-occur with the adjective terrible.)

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category 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 (or put more simply, a noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing or abstract idea).^[1]

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

In traditional English grammar, the noun is one of the eight parts of speech.

History

Noun comes from the Latin nōmen «name»,^[2] a translation of Ancient Greek ónoma.^[3] Word classes like nouns were first described by Pāṇini in the Sanskrit language and by Ancient Greek grammarians, and were defined by the grammatical forms that they take. In Greek and Sanskrit, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.

Because nouns and adjectives share these three categories, Dionysius Thrax does not clearly distinguish between the two, and uses the term ónoma «name» for both, although some of the words that he describes as paragōgón (pl. paragōgá) «derived»^[4] are adjectives.^[5]

Different definitions of nouns

Expressions of natural language have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they take and what kinds of other expressions they combine with; but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of a noun at the outset of this article is thus a formal, traditional grammatical definition. That definition, for the most part, is considered uncontroversial and furnishes the means for users of certain languages to effectively distinguish most nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns as words that are modified by definite articles. There have also been several attempts to define nouns in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are discussed below.

Names for things

In traditional school grammars, one often encounters the definition of nouns that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition. It has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.^[6] Contemporary linguists generally agree that one cannot successfully define nouns (or other grammatical categories) in terms of what sort of object in the world they refer to or signify. Part of the conundrum is that the definition makes use of relatively general nouns (thing, phenomenon, event) to define what nouns are.

The existence of such general nouns demonstrates that nouns refer to entities that are organized in taxonomic hierarchies. But other kinds of expressions are also organized into such structured taxonomic relationships. For example the verbs stroll, saunter, stride, and tread are more specific words than the more general walk – see Troponymy. Moreover, walk is more specific than the verb move, which, in turn, is less general than change. But it is unlikely that such taxonomic relationships can be used to define nouns and verbs. We cannot define verbs as those words that refer to changes or states, for example, because the nouns change and state probably refer to such things, but, of course, are not verbs. Similarly, nouns like invasion, meeting, or collapse refer to things that are done or happen. In fact, an influential theory has it that verbs like kill or die refer to events,^[7][8] one of the categories of things that nouns are supposed to refer to.

The point being made here is not that this view of verbs is wrong, but rather that this property of verbs is a poor basis for a definition of this category, just like the property of having wheels is a poor basis for a definition of cars (some things that have wheels, such as most suitcases or a jumbo jet, aren’t cars). Similarly, adjectives like yellow or difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside or upstairs seem to refer to places, which are also among the sorts of things nouns can refer to. But verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are not nouns, and nouns are not verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. One might argue that definitions of this sort really rely on speakers’ prior intuitive knowledge of what nouns, verbs, and adjectives are, and so do not really add anything. Speakers’ intuitive knowledge of such things might plausibly be based on formal criteria, such as the traditional grammatical definition of English nouns aforementioned.

Predicates with identity criteria

The British logician Peter Thomas Geach proposed a more subtle semantic definition of nouns.^[9] He noticed that adjectives like «same» can modify nouns, but no other kinds of parts of speech, like verbs or adjectives. Not only that, but there also do not seem to be any other expressions with similar meaning that can modify verbs and adjectives. Consider the following examples.

grammatical: John and Bill participated in the same fight.

ungrammatical: *John and Bill samely fought.

There is no English adverb samely. In some other languages, like Czech, however there are adverbs corresponding to samely. Hence, in Czech, the translation of the last sentence would be fine; however, it would mean that John and Bill fought in the same way: not that they participated in the same fight. Geach proposed that we could explain this, if nouns denote logical predicates with identity criteria. An identity criterion would allow us to conclude, for example, that person x at time 1 is the same person as person y at time 2. Different nouns can have different identity criteria. A well known example of this is due to Gupta:^[10]

National Airlines transported 2 million passengers in 1979.

National Airlines transported (at least) 2 million persons in 1979.

Given that, in general, all passengers are persons, the last sentence above ought to follow logically from the first one. But it doesn’t. It is easy to imagine, for example, that on average, every person who travelled with National Airlines in 1979, travelled with them twice. In that case, one would say that the airline transported 2 million passengers but only 1 million persons. Thus, the way that we count passengers isn’t necessarily the same as the way that we count persons. Put somewhat differently: At two different times, you may correspond to two distinct passengers, even though you are one and the same person. For a precise definition of identity criteria, see Gupta.^[10]

Prototypically referential expressions

Another semantic definition of nouns is that they are prototypically referential.^[11]

Recently, Mark Baker^[12] has proposed that Geach’s definition of nouns in terms of identity criteria allows us to explain the characteristic properties of nouns. He argues that nouns can co-occur with (in-)definite articles and numerals, and are prototypically referential because they are all and only those parts of speech that provide identity criteria. Baker’s proposals are quite new, and linguists are still evaluating them.

Classification of nouns in English

Proper nouns and common nouns

A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter, Larry, or Toyota), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet, person or car).^[13]

Agent nouns

Agent nouns are usually common nouns (although they may be proper nouns, such as in titles or adopted surnames) that take the form of a subject (typically a person) performing an action (verb). Examples in English are maker (from to make), teacher (from to teach), and actor and actress (from to act).

Countable and uncountable nouns

Count nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article (a or an). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.

Mass nouns (or non-count nouns) differ from count nouns in precisely that respect: they can’t take plural or combine with number words or quantifiers. Examples from English include laughter, cutlery, helium, and furniture. 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]

Collective nouns

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 the singular.

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 (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

A noun phrase is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word (nominal) optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives.

Pronouns

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 Janet 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 subparts 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.

Substantive as a word for noun

«Substantive» redirects here. For other uses, see Substance (disambiguation).

Starting with old Latin grammars, many European languages use some form 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. This corresponds to those grammars in which nouns and adjectives phase into each other in more areas than, for example, the English term predicate adjective entails. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns referring to people who have the characteristics of the adjective. The most common metalanguage to name this concept is nominalization. An example in English is:

This legislation will have the most impact on the poor.

Similarly, an adjective can also be used for a whole group or organization of people:

The Socialist International.

Hence, these words are substantives that are usually adjectives in English.

The word nominal also overlaps in meaning and usage with noun and adjective.

See also

• Description
• Grammatical case
• Phi features
• Reference

References

Bibliography

• Laycock, Henry, 2005 ‘Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns’, Draft version of entry in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Oxford: Elsevier (pdf)

External links

• Nouns — Singular and Plural Agreement
• ESL Guide to Countable and Uncountable Nouns
• Nouns