Nouns Flashcards
What is a noun?
A noun is the name of a place, person, thing, or idea.
Whatever exists, we assume, can be named, and that name is a noun.
What is a proper noun?
A Proper Noun names a specific person, place, or thing, and is almost always capitalized. “Jeremy, England, The Abyss.”
What is a proper noun called when used as an addressed person’s name?
A Noun of Address
Proper nouns name specific things, places, people, or ideas, and are capitalized. What do common nouns do?
Common nouns name everything else and are usually not capitalized.
A group of words acting as a noun with both a subject and a verb is called a what?
A Noun Clause, and can do anything a noun can do.
“What he does for this town is a blessing.”
What is a noun phrase?
It is frequently a noun accompanied by modifiers, it is a group of related words acting as a noun. “The oil depletion allowance.” “The abnormal, hideously enlarged nose.”
What are count nouns?
Count nouns are nouns that name anything that can be counted.
“Four books, Two continents, A few dishes, a dozen buildings”
What are mass/non-count nouns?
Mass/non-count nouns name something that cannot be counted. “Water, air, energy, blood.”
What are collective nouns?
Collective nouns can take singular forms but are composed of more than one individual or items. “jury, team, committee, herd”
Some words can be either a count noun or a non-count noun. How can we tell the difference?
Whether these words are count or non-count nouns depends on if they are able to be used with articles and determiners.
“He got into trouble.” (Non-count)
“He had many troubles.” (countable)
We would not write “He got into the troubles.” Instead, we would say: “The troubles of Ireland.”
What are abstract nouns?
Nouns that are not tangible, such as warmth, justice, grief, and peace.
They can appear with or without determiners. “Peace settled over the countryside.” “The skirmish disrupted the peace that had settled over the countryside.”
What are the three forms of nouns?
- Subjective: “The English professor [subject] is tall.
- Possessive: “The English professor’s [possessive] car is green.”
- Objective: “He chose the English professor [object].
What are the different forms of a noun between possessive, objective, and subjective forms?
Only two, nouns in the subject and object role are identical. Nouns that show the possessive, however, take a different form. Usually an apostrophe is added followed by the letter s (except for plurals, those that end with s get only an apostrophe).
Do nouns change form when they become plural?
Yes, usually receiving an -s or -es.
Exceptions do exist.
What are the 3 formal tests for nouns?
- Does the word contain a noun-making morpheme? Organiz_ation_, misconcep_tion_, weird_ness_, state_hood_, state_hood_.
- Can the word take a plural-making morpheme? Pencil_s_, box_es_.
- Can the word take a possessive-making morpheme? today_‘s_, boy__’s__.
