In grammar, a noun is a word that denotes a concrete or abstract entity, like living creatures, places, actions, events, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. To summarize this, nouns signify an object or idea. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence. In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category (part of speech) 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
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. The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), 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 (2nd century BC). 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 (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). 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 (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 simply 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 that are sometimes called noun equivalents). 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 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)
Characterization and definition Nouns have sometimes been characterized in terms of the grammatical categories by which they may be varied (for example gender, case, and number). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since different languages may apply different categories. 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., but this manner of definition has been criticized as uninformative. Several English nouns lack an intrinsic referent of their own: behalf (as in on behalf of), dint (by dint of), and sake (for the sake of). 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 (as stated at the start of this article), but this could not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.
Gender
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