Nouns

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.  (See, I told you you’d learned this as a child!)  As far as parts of speech (or form-classes) go, that’s really all there is to it at the second or third grade level.

Examples:

children

churches

horse

confusion

the doll

Santa Ana, CA

Scantron

despair

an aunt

the park

rice

a magnitude

Pokémon

Never-Never Land

the answer

epistemologies

Just looking at this list, you can learn many things.  Nouns are either singular, meaning one, or plural, meaning more than one.  Nouns can be made plural, usually (but not always!) by the addition of –s or –es.  They are often used with a, an, or the, which are called articles, as well as with other determiners, like my, six, this, and any, (respectively: possessive adjectives, numbers, demonstrative pronouns, and indefinite pronouns).  Nouns are sometimes capitalized to show that they are specific names; such nouns are called proper nouns.  Nouns can be abstract or concrete, countable or noncountable (aka mass).  They may also be collective. These are some characteristics of nouns we will be examining at the very beginning of this semester.

            Children are taught the sub-categories of the parts of speech (proper/common, countable/noncountable, animate/inanimate, person/non-person, abstract/concrete), and non-native speakers must overtly learn the rules which native speakers unconsciously follow in order to use nouns correctly.  For a wonderful overview of nouns which covers all of these subcategories, have a look at Ruth Heller's Merry-Go-Round: A Book about Nouns in the juvenile section of the JBU library.  You will also find there another Ruth Heller book exclusively on collective nouns called A Cache of Jewels and Other Collective Nouns and more books on other parts of speech.

Preview: Later in the course we will examine words more closely for signals that tell us that a word is likely to be a noun, independent of information from the sentence or even the word’s meaning.  Affixes—that is, suffixes and prefixes, which are meaning carrying clusters of sound added onto a word's root meaning—often tell us information relative to the word's part of speech or function.  For example, nouns are typically made plural by adding -s or -es.  Words that end with –ion are likely to be nouns, as in relation, contagion, and transportation.  However, –ion is not always a suffix—that is, an ending added onto a word.  In the word onion, for example, the ion is part of the word, not added on.  The study of word parts and their semantic value is called morphology, or the study of morphemes, which are clusters of letters that carry meaning.

 

Another preview: In the rest of this course, not here, we will also talk about the most likely functions of nouns in sentences.  A noun might be the topic of a sentence, what it’s about—that is, the subject of the sentence.  Or it might be direct and indirect object, which are acted upon in some way by the subject.  A noun might be used with a relational word to show the location or connection between itself and another noun, in other words as the object of the preposition.  It might be used with a linking verb to restate the subject in different terms—that is, as a complement (aka predicate nominative).  Or it might restate a noun directly next to it as an appositive.  

I say that these are the most likely functions of nouns because a noun can function as just about anything in a sentence.  I know this is confusing, but consider a taxonomy such as cooking utensils.  They might be broken down into categories such as pots, pans, spatulas, tongs, nut picks, garlic presses, etc.  The category each belongs to suggests much about how it is likely to be used, and most people can tell you these functions.  Pots are used to cook liquids in, pans to fry meats and vegetables in, spatulas to turn fried things in the pan, tongs to lift things out of a pan or pot, nut picks to get nutmeats out of the shell, garlic presses to press garlic, etc.  Still, most of these tools can be used differently.  A pot might be used to pound meat flat or to bake a meatloaf in.  You might also fry something in a pot or use it to press a clove of garlic—even though there are tools more specifically for these purposes.  One could also do something entirely unrelated to cooking with a pot, such as batter one’s spouse or bail out a boat.  That is exactly how it is with the parts of speech.  A noun is a noun and is likeliest to function as a subject, object, complement, or appositive in a sentence, but it might also function as an adjective or even a verb.

Questions:

1.  Make a 5 X 3 table entitled Determiners.  In the far left column, list the five types mentioned in this section.  In the second column, copy in the example(s) given.  In the far right column, give additional examples that you believe would belong in the same category. 

2.  Make another table entitled Nouns and follow the same instructions for creating a taxonomy of the subcategories with examples of each.

3.  In any taxonomy, labels are important, as they depict the characteristics of that type.  Try to come up with your own, uninformed definition of determiner that addresses the characteristics shared by all of the subcategories.  Why do you suppose a determiner is called a determiner?  Consider the labels of the sub-categories of determiners.  Why are indefinite pronouns called indefinite?  Why are demonstrative pronouns called demonstrative?

4. Some students find it frustrating that the terms for grammatical entities they learn in the book used in this course are often not the same as the terms they learned in school.  They learned the terms predicate nominative and possessive adjective, for example, and not nominal subject complement and possessive pronoun.  I take pains to include alternative terminology, usually following aka for also known as in parentheses.  List here any terminology you may have learned for items given different labels.  List the alternative name(s) next to each one.

5.  For discussion with your study group members: Consider Ruth Heller's book on nouns, Merry-Go-Round.  Who do you think is her intended audience?  Why would someone write such a book?  What is the book's underlying argument?  What is the book's compelling tone (tone=attitude toward a topic)?  Can you imagine reading this book with a child you know?  At what age?  Imagine using this book in a Sunday school course you were teaching.  What would be the subject of your lesson?