The Noun
What is a Noun?
A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea. Nouns are usually the first words which small children learn.
The highlighted words in the following sentences are all nouns:
- My friend is a student .
- Anna has dark eyes.
A noun can function in a sentence as a subject, a direct object, an indirect object, a subject complement, an object complement, an appositive, an adjective or an adverb.
Gender Noun
Many common nouns, like "engineer" or "teacher," can refer to men or women. Once, many English nouns would change form depending on their gender -- for example, a man was called an "author" while a woman was called an "authoress" -- but this use of gender-specific nouns is very rare today. Those that are still used occasionally tend to refer to occupational categories, as in the following sentences.
- Dustin Hoffman is a great actor.
- And Julia Robert is a lovely actress
Countable Nouns
there are two types of nouns, grammatically speaking; Countable and uncountable (non-countable) nouns.
So What is a countable noun?
Countable is an adjective derived from verb "to count":(1,2,3,4...n). Now if we can count that "noun", it means it is "countable".Example :
- a book, two books, three books, etc
- an apple, two apples, three apples, etc
As you may notice, a countable noun has two forms; the singular and the plural forms.
The singular noun is preceeded by the indefinite articles a or an.("a" and "an" mean "one")
But when the number of that "noun" is more than one, we add an "s" or "es" at its ending. Most often we add simply an "s". But if the noun ends with "ch", "sh", "o", "ss","x" or "i", we add "es".There are other nouns where we change the last letter before adding "s" to form the plural.
- If the word ends with _f, we change the "f" into "v" and we add _es at the end.
- If the word ends with _fe,we change the "fe" into "ve" and we add _s at the end.
- And if the word ends with _y and the "y" is preceeded by a consonant (b, c, d, f, g...z), we change "y" into "i" then we add _es at the end. But if the "y" is preceeded by a vowel (a,e, i, o, u), we simply add "s", without making any change.
Example :
- a peach, two peaches
- a dish, two dishes
- a tomato, two tomatoes
- a boss, two bosses
- a box, two boxes
- a leaf, two leaves
- a knife, two knives
- a candy, two candies
- a boy, two boys
But
If the rules mentioned above can be applied to a noun, it is labelled then as aregular noun. However, there are some nouns the plural form of which has no rules. Such nouns are called irregular nouns.The origines of most of the irregular nouns can be German, Greek or Latin. Here are some Examples:
Singular |
Plural |
man |
men |
woman |
women |
mouse |
mice |
child |
children |
syllabus |
syllabi or (syllabuses) |
Uncountable Nouns
Uncountable nouns are substances, concepts etc that we cannot divide into separate elements. We cannot "count" them. For example, we cannot count "coffee". But to count it, we use unit of measure or container.
The table below illustrates this:
Uncountable Nouns |
How to count them |
|
a cup of coffee |
|
two glasses of milk |
|
three bars of chocolate |
|
two jars of honey |
|
two pieces of cheese |
What is counted here is not the noun itself, but the container ( cup, glass, bar, jar, piece). And as you may see, the singular form does not take "a" or "an". Dictionaries tells us whether the "noun",(n), is "countable", (C)or "uncountable",(U).
Possessive Nouns
In the possessive case, a noun or pronoun changes its form to show that it owns or is closely related to something else. Usually, nouns become possessive by adding a combination of an apostrophe ( ' ) and the letter "S" at the end.
We can form the possessive case of a singular noun that does not end in "s" by adding an apostrophe and "s", as in the following sentences:
- This is Jim's father.
We can also form the possessive case of a singular noun that ends in "S" by adding an apostrophe alone or by adding an apostrophe and "s", as in the following examples show:
- The bus's seats are very uncomfortable.
- The bus' seats are very uncomfortable.
or
We can form the possessive case of a plural noun that ends in "S" by adding an apostrophe without the "s":
- Those are my friends' siblings.
Using Possessive Nouns
When you read the following sentences, you will notice that a noun in the possessive case frequently functions as an adjective modifying another noun:
- The miner's face was covered with coal dust.
Here the possessive noun "miner's" is used to modify the noun "face" .And together with the article "the", they make up the noun phrase that is the sentence's subject.
Other types Of Nouns
There are many different types of nouns. As you may know, we capitalise some, such as "Morocco" or "Driss"; but we do not capitalise others, such as "book" or "café" (unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence). In fact, grammarians have developed a whole series of noun types, including the proper noun, the common noun, the concrete noun, the abstract noun and the collective noun.
If you are interested in the details of these different types, you can read about them in the following sections.
Proper Nouns
You always write a proper noun with a "CAPITAL LETTER", since the noun represents the name of a specific person, place, or thing. The proper noun can be a name or a label. The names of days of the week, months, historical documents, institutions, organisations, religions, their holy texts and their adherents are proper nouns.
Example:
- Sara and Peter are close friends.
- Rabat is the capital of Morocco.
- On Friday, I can go to Fez .
- Youness has got Nike trainers.
Common Nouns
A common noun is a noun referring to a person, place, or thing in a general sense. In other words, a common noun is a word that names people, places, things, or ideas. They are not the names of a single person, place or thing.
In each of the following sentences, the common nouns are highlighted:
- She listen to the radio.
- There is a nice movie on telly.
- The father of Peter likes dogs very much.
- Jihad goes to school every day.
The words "radio", "movie","telly","father ", "dogs","school" and "day" are common nouns and written in lower-case letters, because they are not at the beginning of a sentence.
Abstract Nouns
An abstract noun is a noun that we cannot touch or behold (but we can feel it). It is the name we give to an emotion, ideal or idea. They have no physical existence, you can't see, hear, touch, smell or taste them. It is the opposite of an abstract noun. here are some exmaples:feeling, happiness, sadness, justice, freedom, faith, idea, ...
Concrete noun
A concrete noun is a noun which names anything that you can perceive through your physical senses: touch, sight, taste, hearing, or smell. It can aloso be common noun exept for people or animals. it is opposite of a abstract noun. Here are some examples:
rock, table, door, book, file, pen, screen, computer, wall,house,etc.
Collective Nouns
A collective noun is a noun that is singular in form but refers to a group of specific people or things. For example:
The noun furniturerefers to a set of nouns like Tables,couch, wardrobe, bed,chairs, cupboards, carpet,etc.
Collective nouns are often uncountable.And sometimes they are more general:For example>
- Groups of people: army, audience, band, choir, class, committee, crew, family, gang, jury, orchestra, police, staff, team, trio.
- Groups of animals: colony, flock, herd, pack, pod, school, swarm.
- Groups of things: bunch, bundle, clump, pair, set, stack.