Semantically defined class of nouns that unequivocally identifies objects and states of affairs within a given context. By designating an object or a state of affairs in a given statement, proper nouns replace deictic, or pointing, gestures such that...
Important syntactic category which makes up the majority of items in the English vocabulary. Nouns are marked morphologically in many Indo-European languages by the categories gender, number, and case. As the nucleus of noun phrases, they can be...
// n. (N) One of the principal lexical categories. This category appears to be universally present in languages; while prototypical nouns have meanings denoting individual physical entities like dog and tree, words that behave grammatically as nouns...
See also abstract noun, collective noun, common noun, count noun, mass noun, noun clause, noun phrase, proper noun A noun is a part of speech (or word class) which names a person, a thing or a concept. In the following sentence the nouns are in...
Concretes form a class of nouns that contrasts semantically with abstract nouns; they are divided into proper names ( proper nouns. e.g. Philip, Chomsky), common (or generic) nouns (e.g. human, linguist), materials (e.g. ink, iron) and groups (...
See also count, grammar, noun, parts of speech When a noun is not normally used in the plural we term it a mass or uncountable noun. They are rarely if ever used with the indefinite article – ‘a’ or ‘an’. Examples include:...
Semantically defined class of nouns which refer to materials: chalk, wood, marble. Material nouns are mass nouns, i.e. nouns which have no plural form or whose plural forms do not refer to the material itself, but to something else, cf. wood vs...
In contrast to concrete nouns, abstracts form a semantically defined class of nouns that denote concepts (psyche), characteristics (laziness), relationships (kinship), institutions (marriage), etc., but not persons, objects, substances, or the...
See also common noun, grammar, noun, parts of speech Easily recognisable because it begins with a capital letter, a proper noun refers to definite persons, places and periods of time (for example: Richard, Paris,...
In linguistics, a noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other kinds of expressions. Since different languages have different inventories of kinds of expressions, the definition of noun...
