What part of speech is the word noun

A noun,
or noun substantive, is
a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in)
definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the
head of a noun phrase.

The word «noun» derives from the Latin
nomen meaning
«name», and a traditional definition of nouns is that they
are all and only those expressions that refer to a person,
place, thing,
event,
substance,
quality or idea.
They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a
preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary
linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that
verbs like kill
or die refer to
events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives
like yellow or
difficult might
be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside
or upstairs seem
to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns,
so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns
from other parts of speech.

Case, number, and gender

In sentences, noun phrases may function in a variety
of different ways, the most obvious being as subjects
or objects. For
example, in the sentence «John wrote me a letter», «John»
is the subject, and «me» and «letter» are objects
(of which «letter» is a noun and «me» a pronoun).
These different roles are known as noun
cases. Variant forms of the same noun—such
as «he» (subject) and «him» (object)—are called
declensions.

The number
of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the
simplest case, number distinguishes between singular («man»)
and plural («men»). Some languages, like Arabic (and also
Saami and Aleut ) also distinguish dual from plural.

Many languages (though not English) have a concept of
noun gender,
also known as noun class,
whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or
feminine.

12. Category of number.

English countable nouns have 2 categories of number:

singular

plural

І. The plural form is formed be adding the ending -s, -es,
pronounced as /z/, /s/, /iz/.

2. if the noun ends in –y presided by a consonant. –y is changed
into –i + -es-

13. Category of case.

Case indicates the relations of the noun ( or pronoun ) to the other
words in the sentence. Nouns denoting living beings and some nouns
denoting lifeless things have two cases:

the common case.

the genitive case.

The genitive case is formed by:

‘s – is used with the singular and plural nouns not ending in –s:

a man’s job, men’s job, a child’s voice, a children’s
voice.

b) a simple apostrophe (‘)is used with plural nouns ending in –s:

the students’ hostel, the Smiths’ car.

other names ending I –s can take “ ’s ” or the “ ’ ”
alone:

14. The problem of gender.

In linguistics, the term gender
refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological
gender by inflecting words. For example, in the words actor
and actress the
suffix -or
denotes «male person» (masculine), and the suffix -ress
denotes «female person» (feminine). This type of
inflection, called lexical gender,
is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages,
including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally,
Modern English does not mark nouns for gender, but it expresses
gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he
(male person), she
(female person), and it
(object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms.
When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and
pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical
gender. Grammatical gender may be partly
assigned by convention, so it doesn’t always coincide with natural
gender. Furthermore, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate
objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. Gender can refer to the
(biological) condition of being male or female, or less commonly
hermaphrodite or neuter, as applied to humans, animals, and plants.
In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex,
a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a
synonym for sexual intercourse.

15. Noun determiners. The article.

An article
is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of
reference being made by the noun. Articles can have various
functions:

a definite
article (English the)
is used before singular and plural nouns that refer to a particular
member of a group. (The cat on the mat is
black.)

an indefinite
article (English a,
an) is used
before singular nouns that refer to any member of a group. (A
cat is a mammal).

a partitive
article indicates an indefinite
quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive article in English,
though the words some
or any often
have that function.

a zero article
is the absence of an article (e.g. English indefinite plural), used
in some languages in contrast with the presence of one. Linguists
hypothesize the absence as a zero article based on the X-bar theory.

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Words can be considered as the smallest independent elements in language and communication. In the English language, words can be classified under 8 major word types or parts of speech namely, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections. In this article, you will learn more about the most common and simplest word type, which is the noun.

What is a Noun?

In the simplest sense, a noun is any word that names people, things, animals, places, events, or ideas. Take a look at the sentences below:

• Jack Gleeson, the actor who plays as Joffrey in Game of Thrones, was the boy saved by Batman in Batman Begins.
• Beatrice and Carla will meet at the coffee shop on Tuesday.
• For me, birthdays are just ordinary days.

All of the underlined words in the sample sentences above are nouns. Now that you already know the answer to the question, “What is a noun?” it’s time to discuss the different functions, genders, and plural forms of nouns.

What are the Functions of a Noun?

A noun can function as a subject, an object (object of the preposition, direct object, indirect object), and a subject complement in a sentence.

Examples:

• Arya Stark is really cool.
• In this example, the underlined noun serves as the subject in the sentence.

• They were supposed to meet at noon.
• The noun in this sentence functions as an object of the preposition. (at is the preposition)

• Jeremy is a swimmer.
• This sample sentence has two nouns, “Jeremy” and “swimmer”. “Jeremy” is a noun that serves as the subject, while the underlined noun acts as the subject complement.

• The beavers built a dam.
• In this sentence, “beavers” is the subject, the word “built” is the verb, and the underlined word is the noun that serves as the direct object (the thing that is acted upon).

• He gave Maria a love letter.
• This example has two nouns, “Maria” and “love letter.” The thing that is acted upon (direct object) is the “love letter,” while the indirect object is “Maria.” Simply put, an indirect object refers to the recipient or the one who gets the direct object.

What are the Different Genders of Nouns?

Aside from providing the answer to the question, “What is a noun?” and discussing the various functions, this article will also explore noun genders. Basically, there are four genders of nouns, and these are: masculine, feminine, common, and neuter.

1. Neuter – this gender simply refers to nouns that have no sex.

• Examples: computer, city, pizza, bus, brownies, oven

2. Common– is the gender of nouns which can refer to either the male or female sex.

• Examples: student, driver, lawyer, criminal, leader, visitor

3. Masculine– this refers to nouns of the male sex

• Examples: sorcerer, actor, tiger, rooster, prince, fox, stag, bull, ram

4.Feminine– this denotes nouns of the female sex.

• Examples: sorceress, actress, tigress, hen, princess, vixen, doe, cow, ewe

What are the Different Forms of Nouns?

Nouns normally come in their singular form, however, if these nouns name more than one person, place, thing, animal, event, or idea, it is necessary for you to transform them into their plural form.

These are most common ways of pluralizing nouns:

1. Add “s”

Examples:

• bike- bikes
• trap- traps
• coin- coins
• game- games
• swimming pool- swimming pools

2. Add “es”

Examples:

• beach- beaches
• potato- potatoes
• hero- heroes
• box- boxes
• torch- torches

3. Change “y” to “i,” and then add “es”

Examples:

• butterfly- butterflies
• party- parties
• reply- replies
• factory- factories
• baby- babies

Note: Sometimes, you just have to add “s” without changing “y” to “i” (e.g., chimney- chimneys; trolley- trolleys)

4. Change “f” to “v,” and then add “s” or “es”

Examples:

• wife- wives (“s” only)
• thief- thieves (“es”)
• loaf- loaves (“es”)
• knife- knives (“s” only)
• wolf- wolves (“es”)

Note: Sometimes, you only need to add “s” without changing “f” to “v” (e.g., cliff- cliffs; chef- chefs).

Other ways of pluralizing nouns:

1. For some nouns ending in “um,” change “um” to “a”

Examples:

• medium- media
• curriculum- curricula
• bacterium- bacteria
• ovum- ova
• datum- data

2. For some nouns ending in “is,” change “is” to “es”

Examples:

• crisis- crises
• analysis- analyses
• thesis- theses
• axis- axes
• oasis- oases

3. For some nouns ending in “us” change “us” to “i”

Examples:

• radius- radii
• nucleus- nuclei
• fungus- fungi
• stimulus- stimuli
• bacillus- bacilli

4. Some nouns have the same singular and plural form

Examples:

• sheep
• deer
• moose

Final Thoughts

This article entitled “Parts of Speech: What is a Noun?” can be a good starting point in your exploration of the different types of words that can be regarded as the building blocks of grammar. If you want to have great grammar skills and improve your writing, you really need to have a good grasp of what is a noun, as well as the other parts of speech. These things can be considered among the most basic yet essential concepts in grammar, so it’s really important for you to be well acquainted with these before moving on to the more advanced topics.

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.