Noun Definitions:

Most native speakers of English use several different sources of information to decide if a word is a noun or not. First, they often use semantic information to inform their decisions. A noun is usually defined as a word for a person, place, thing, or idea, and so many native speakers begin by thinking of the meaning of a word. If it is clear it refers to a person, a place, of a concrete object, they will decide it is a noun.

Other clues are also available to them, however, and native speakers may use word suffixes to help them determine if a word is a noun or not. Nouns may take one of three inflectional suffixes: 1) plural –s, 2) possessive ‘s, or 3) possessive s’. Nouns may also have been created from other words through the attachment of certain suffixes. Among the suffixes that signal a word is a noun derived from other words are –ist, -er, -ess, -ment, -ness, -tion etc. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it shows that the morphology of a word can help identify its syntactic category.

Still other clues to a word’s category can be gleaned from the sentence structure. Nouns can be preceded by the word the, except for proper singular nouns. Also, nouns regularly play certain grammatical roles within a sentence. There are 7 roles filled by nouns: 1) Subject (Su), 2) Direct Object (DO), 3) Indirect Object (IO), 4) Object of Preposition (OP), 5) Subject Complement (SuComp), 6) Object Complement (OComp), 7) Appositive (App).

In short, then, there are several clues native speakers use to determine if a word is a noun or not, and they rarely rely on just one approach alone. Obviously, one reason that native speakers use these clues is to help them separate nouns from other types of words, like verbs, and confirming which words are nouns helps them decode the meaning of a sentence.

Activity 8.2: Different Kinds of Nouns

Exercise A: Click on each noun in the following sentences to change the color to green. When all the nouns in any one sentence are selected, a check mark will appear.

Identify the noun's syntactic roles in the sentencs by typing following abbreviations above each of them: 1) Subject (Su), 2) Direct Object (DO), 3) Indirect Object (IO), 4) Object of Preposition (OP), 5) Subject Complement (SuComp), 6) Object Complement (OComp), 7) Appositive (App). NOTE: Answers are case senstive.

Click on the check mark to assess your answer.

Exercise B: Look again at the nouns in exercise 1, and group them together according to similarities. What principles did you use to create the groups?

Drag the nouns down into appropriate columns to separate them by similarities. (Each noun will go into multiple groups.)
Click on the green arrow to show nouns that still need put into a category.

Label the top of the columns with the principles you used for separation.

After a number of tries, a "Clue" button will appear. Click on this to sequence through the principles you should be using for the sorting.

After you have moved all the nouns to appropriate groups a "Solution" button will appear.  Click on the solution button for the correct answer.

Subcategories of Nouns

The whole category of nouns can be subdivided into smaller groups. First, nouns divide into common and proper nouns. Proper nouns are those that can best be called names: they refer to very specific people, places or things. Often a noun is defined as the name for a person place or thing, but I find this doesn’t leave a way to explain the difference between a common and a proper noun later on. I prefer to say a noun is a word that refers to a person place or thing and that a proper noun is a word that is a name, while a common noun is any other noun. In the sentence above, Jenna, Denver, Mastercard, Hansons, Rockies, and Harleys all are proper nouns. Proper nouns are written with a capital letter in English. This may take some practice for native speakers of German, where all nouns are written with capital letters, and for speakers of Arabic where there are no capital letters at all. Proper nouns can be divided again into singular and plural nouns. Plural proper nouns are less frequent, but possible. Most common are when family members are all referred to by the family name: the Hansons, and places that are pluralized: islands in a group or mountains in a range, such as the Rockies, the Rocky Mountains, the Philippine Islands, or the Philippines.

Apart from the proper nouns are the common nouns. Common nouns show up frequently in English. Common nouns aren’t marked with capital letters in writing, but even a common noun will take a capital letter when it is the first word in a sentence. Common nouns subdivide again into count and noncount nouns. Noncount nouns are also called mass nouns. Understanding the distinction between count and noncount nouns is very difficult. The terms create the impression that some nouns refer to things that can be counted and others to things that can’t, and this is a typical starting point for teaching non-native speakers. Working with the clearest cases first, a teacher can count out the number of students in the class, pens in a pencil case, and so on. Then the teacher can challenge students to count while he/she pours water into a cup, sugar into someone’s hand, and so on. Then the teacher can move on to show that all liquids and powders are noncount. But eventually the time will come when the distinction isn’t so clear cut: lentils are count, but rice is noncount, facts are count, but information is noncount, exercises are count, but homework is noncount. What makes the distinction?

In reality, the categorization is more arbitrary that the labels indicate. Nevertheless, the original distinction can be pushed a little further than is usually done to show why certain words are noncount instead of count. As already noted words that refer to liquids and powders typically become noncount nouns. We can extend this to include any substance that in nature has no distinct form, that is, any shapeless substance, and this is why gold and ice are noncount; these can take the form of any container that they are in. Very often, words that refer not to any distinct item but cover a range of items as a categorization term are often noncount. This is why jewelry and furniture are noncount, but rings and chairs are count. The noun subcategories chart at the end of the chapter provides more examples and the larger feature that accounts for the categorization. Still, while this allows us to extend the concrete distinction of count and noncount further, we eventually run into the question of why lentils and peas and beans are count while rice is noncount. At some point the arbitrariness does kick in and we have to simply say “because.”

Page 3 - Noun Phrases