The noun is a central lexical unit of languages. It is the main nominative unit of speech. As any other part of speech can be characterize by 3 characteristics:
- semantic( the meaning). According to different principles of classification nouns fall into several subclasses:
- according to the type of nomination: proper( Mary, Moscow, Monday) and common( dog, book, family)
- according to the form of existence they maybe animate( human and non-human) and inanimate
- according to their quantitative structure, nouns can be countable and uncountable
- morphological( the form and grammatical categories):
- in accordance with the morphological structure of the stems all nouns can be classified into: simple( has only root morpheme in its structure), derived( consist of a root and one or more affixes), compound( in which two or more stands are combine into lexical unit) and derivational compound( are those in which phrase components are joined together by means of compounding and affixation)
- the noun has morphological categories of number and case. Some scholars admit the existence of the category of gender
- syntactical( function and distribution) - the noun can be used in the sentence in all syntactic function but predicate
