2017-02-04 - Parts of Speech: Nouns

Parts of Speech

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - Nouns
• Part 3 - Verbs
• Part 4 - Pronouns
• Part 5 - Articles
• Part 6 - Adjectives
• Part 7 - Determiner
• Part 8 - Adverbs

We are going to start our investigation of the parts of speech with nouns. Nouns are said to name things. They are used to refer to entities, things, ideas, people, or places. Nouns can have multiple forms on inflections depending on how they are being used. These inflections are important to us because they can change the spelling of the word and can impact the spelling and word choice of the words used in association with the noun.

Proper nouns refer to specific entities while common nouns refer to general things. Proper nouns are capitalized while common nouns are not. For Example "General Petre Dumitrescu" is capitalized because it refers to a specific person while "an admiral" isn't because it refers to an non-specific person. Although these technically aren't inflections I am including them because they do change the word.

One of the main ways nouns are inflected is to show number. You can have singular nouns such as "An Apple" and plural nouns such as "Apples". In English plurals are commonly formed from singular nouns by adding s or es but some words have irregular plurals such as "Children". Uncountable nouns refer to things which can't be referred to in the singular such as "Apple Juice". You can't take a single bit of apple juice out of a glass. This often depends on how the word is being used for example you can ask for "an apple juice" or "five apple juices" in which case you mean a glass or glasses of apple juice.

Another way nouns are inflected is to show possession. For example "the cat's" or "the building's". Possession is usually expressed using an 's and sometimes just an ' if the noun ends in s. Possession doesn't necessarily express ownership.

Although not common in English some languages also inflect nouns for gender. For example "chat" is French for a male cat while "chatte" is French for a female cat. In these languages most nouns have a gender but not all of them can be inflected to express a different gender. For example "livre" is French for book and is a masculine noun but there is no feminine form of book.

Next time we will look at a subclass of nouns called pronouns.