2 Basic Concepts and TerminologyI have to admit, sometimes I ge.docx
Nouns
1.
2. are a part Of Speech
typically denoting a
person, place, thing, animal
or idea. In linguistics, a noun
is a member of a large, open
lexical category whose
members can occur as the
main word in the subject of
3. Nouns have sometimes been
defined in terms of the
grammatical categories to which
they are subject (classed by
gender, inflected for case and
number). Such definitions tend to
be language-specific, since nouns
do not have the same categories in
all languages.
4. A noun in its basic form will often consist of
a single stem, as in the case of the English
nouns cat, man, table and so on. In many
languages nouns can also be formed from
other nouns and from words of other types
through morphological processes, often
involving the addition
of prefixes and suffixes. Examples in English
are the verbal nouns formed from verbs by
the addition of -ing, nouns formed from
verbs using other suffixes such
5. In some languages, nouns are assigned
to genders, such as masculine, feminine
and neuter (or other combinations). The
gender of a noun (as well as its number
and case, where applicable) will often
entail agreement in words that modify
or are related to it. For
example, in French, the singular form
of the definite article is le with
masculine nouns and la with feminines;