The Fundamentals of Nouns

Posted: November 07, 2012

Y[caption id="attachment_10972" align="alignright"]© Microstock Man - Fotolia.com[/caption]ou don't give much thought, during day to day communication, about the complex network of rules that the English language operates on. The noun is one of the most commonly used parts of speech. Read on for some advice on the noun, it's subdivisions and more information on the rules for their proper usage.

Parts of speech serve our communication needs with hardly a conscious thought on our part, but they operate according to a complex, interdependent set of rules and procedures. Here are the basic principles of the noun.

A noun was traditionally described (at least, in the US public school system I oh so slowly passed through and briefly taught in) as a person, a place, or a thing, though some resources extend the definition to apply to intangible things — ideas such as peace and qualities such as fear — as separate categories.

Nouns are also subdivided into proper nouns and common nouns. Proper nouns refer to a specifically named entity such as, for example, a person named Mark, a place called California, a thing called a Mac, and an idea or quality personified as Perfection. Common nouns, by contrast, are generic: man, state, computer, perfection.

Three other classifications to distinguish nouns include countable and uncountable nouns, collective nouns, and concrete and abstract nouns. Countable nouns can be pluralized (word, words), can be accompanied by numbers or quantifiers (“Did he say, ‘Seven words’ or ‘several words’?), and can appear after an indefinite article (“In a word, yes”). Uncountable nouns (also called mass nouns and noncount nouns) share none of these qualities; examples include anger, geology, and weather. (Anger cannot be pluralized to angers, one would not say “seven geologies,” and weather would be preceded by a only if it is used as an adjective, as in “a weather system”).

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