The noun – is a notional word which refers to people, things, ideas, feelings.
Semantically all nouns can be divided into two main groups – proper nouns & common nouns.
1. Nouns that can be counted have two numbers: singular and plural (e. g. singular: a girl, plural: girls).
2. Nouns denoting living beings (and some nouns denoting lifeless things) have two case forms: the common case and the genitive case.
It is doubtful whether the grammatical category of gender exists in Modern English for it is hardly ever expressed by means of grammatical forms.
There is practically only one gender-forming suffix in Modern English, the suffix ess, expressing feminine gender. It is not widely used.
The noun has certain syntactical characteristics.
The chief syntactical functions of the noun in the sentence are those of the subject and the object. But it may also be used as an attribute or a predicative.
The sun was rising in all his splendid beauty.
A noun preceded by a preposition (a prepositional phrase) may be used as attribute, prepositional indirect object, and adverbial modifier.
To the left were clean panes of glass.
The noun is generally associated with the article. Because of the comparative scarcity of morphological distinctions in English in some cases only articles show that the word is a noun.
A noun can be modified by an adjective, a pronoun, by another noun or by verbals.
Morphological composition of nouns.
According to their morphological composition we distinguish simple, derivative and compound nouns.
1. Simple nouns are nouns which have neither prefixes nor suffixes. They are indecomposable: chair, table, room, map, fish, work.
2. Derivative nouns are nouns which have derivative elements (prefixes or suffixes or both): reader, sailor, blackness, childhood, misconduct, inexperience.
Productive noun-forming suffixes are:
-er: reader, teacher, worker
-ist: communist, telegraphist, dramatist
-ess: heiress, hostess, actress
-ness: carelessness, madness, blackness
-ism: socialism, nationalism, imperialism
Unproductive suffixes are:
-hood: childhood, manhood
-dom: freedom
-ship: friendship, relationship
-merit: development
-ance: importance
-ence: dependence
-ty: cruelty
-ity: generosity
3. Compound nouns are nouns built from two or more stems. Compound nouns often have one stress. The meaning of a compound often differs from the meanings of its elements.
The main types of compound nouns are as follows:
(a) noun-stem + noun-stem: appletree, snowball;
(b) adjective-stem + noun-stem: blackbird, bluebell;
(c) verb-stem + noun-stem: pickpocket; the stem of a gerund or of a participle may be the first component of a compound noun: dining-room, reading-hall, dancing-girl.
Proper noun – is used for the particular person, place, thing which is unique. (with the capital letter)
Common noun:
-count: concrete (table); abstract (idea)
-uncount: material (silver), abstract (love)
COLLECTIVE NOUNS
Group nouns – countable nouns, refer to group of individuals. (army, crew,crowd, family ,firm, jury, team)
! bacteria, data & media – sing. & pl.!
Nouns of multitude - used as plurals but have no pl. ending. (people, police, cattle, poultry)
Mass nouns:
-always used in the sing. (furniture, grass, hair wheat)
-always used in the pl. (archives, belongings, clothes, earnings, goods)
