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Noun. In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence. [ 1][ note 1]
Noun phrase. A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. [ 1] Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type. Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as ...
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural – s morpheme.
Pronoun versus pro-form. Pronoun is a category of words. A pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. [ 4] In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not ...
Head (linguistics) In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun ( head noun) water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound.
Proper noun. A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity ( Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Walmart) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities ( continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent ...
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require: agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase, agreement affixes on the verb, a special form of pronoun to replace the noun, an affix on the noun, a class-specific word in the noun phrase.
An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The sacking of the city was an epochal event" (wherein sacking is a gerund form of the verb sack). A verbal noun, as a type of nonfinite verb form, is a term that some grammarians still use when referring to gerunds, gerundives, supines, and nominal forms of infinitives.