Noun.

1. Grammatical meaning.

2. Subcategorization of nouns.

3. Grammatical categories:

1. Gender.

2. Number.

3. Case.

1. Grammatical meaning.

The noun as a part of speech has the categorical meaning of “substance” or “thingness”. “Thingness” is a grammatical meaning that permits names of abstract notions, actions, and qualities to function in the same way with names of objects and living beings. Nouns may be derived from verbs and adj-s by various derivational means and in doing so names of states, properties, and actions can be syntactically parallel to names of things and concepts (blackness, development, activity). These words are defined as syntactic derivatives (Иванова и др. 1981).

Obviously, names of many “substances” are related to their “properties”, which provides the ground to claim that names of substances and names of properties cannot be separated (words like a desert, a plain are treated as nouns).

A noun tells us what someone or something is called. For example, a noun can be the name of a person (John); a job title (doctor), the name of a thing (radio); the name of a place (London); the name of a quality (courage); or the name of an action (laughter / laughing). Nouns are the names we give to people, things, places, etc. In order to identify them. Many nouns are used after a determiner, e.g. a, the, this and often combine with other word to form a noun phrase (the man, the man next door, that small building, the old cup in the cupboard). Nouns and noun phrases answer the questions Who? or What?

2. Subcategorization of nouns (types of nouns).

Semantic classification.

One of the traditional categorizations of the noun consists of two large classes – proper nouns and common nouns.

A proper noun (sometimes called a “proper name”) is used for a particular person, place, thing or idea which is, or is imagined to be, unique. It is generally spelt with a capital letter. Proper nouns include, for example: personal names (Andrew, President Kennedy), forms of address (Mum, Dad, Uncle Fred), geographical names (Asia, India), place names (Madison Avenue), months, days of the week, festivals and seasons (April, Monday, Christmas), unique items (Parliament, the Victorian age, the Conservative Party).

A common noun is any noun that is not the name of a particular person, place, thing or idea.

In ME a grammatical subcategorization of proper nouns also appears to be possible. From this point of view proper nouns fall into two groups: 1) nouns that are used with and without an article; 2) nouns that may function both with and without an article. But in some cases adequate understanding is greatly influenced by presence or absence of the article.

A further differentiation of common nouns is also based on semantics. Four classes are distinguished here:

1. Class nouns denote persons or things belonging to a class. These nouns are countable: shop, table, tree.

2. Collective nouns (or nouns of multitude) denote a number or collection of similar individuals or things regarded as a single unit: police, machinery, people, family, nation, glitterati (young and successful), the Establishment / the Overclass (politicians, business people, officials).

3. Nouns of material denote various substances and are usually uncountable: iron, tea, paper, wine.

4. Abstract nouns are usually difficult to define, as the criteria for this division are rather vague. As a rule, abstract nouns are said to denote some quality, state, action or idea, therefore abstract nouns must be by definition uncountable: kindness, fight, time. However, English grammar establishes lax requirements to abstract nouns. As a result, this group also includes such countable nouns as, for example, idea.

Formal classification.

There may be a subcategorization of common nouns that uses the grammatical category of number as a criterion. It is called a formal subcategorisation. This approach divides common nouns into count nouns (or countables) and mass nouns (or uncountables).