Part of Speech (1)
NounNoun is the part of speech which includes words like girl, tree, and happiness. Traditional grammarian often tries to define a noun as ‘the name of a person, place or things’, but this doesn’t work. Clearly, for example, red is the name of a colour, and so, by this definition , it should be noun – and yet it is most usually an adjective, as in Shinta is wearing a red skirt.
Like any part of speech, nouns can be adequately defined only in terms of their grammatical behaviour. In English, an obvious grammatical characteristic of nouns is that most odf them can appear in two different grammatical forms, called singular and plural. Most english nouns form their plural by adding –s, as in girl/girls, tree/trees, and happiness/hapinesses, but some have irregular form of plural like child/children, goose/geese, etc. However, not all noun do this: some have only a singular form (like wheat, furniture, and spaghetti), while others heve only plural form (like pants, police, and water)
A better way of identifiying nouns is to use a suitable grammatical frame. Consider the two frames. The _______ was nice and The ______ were nice. If you can put single word into one of these blanks to make a good sebtence, then that word mus be a noun, because the grammar of English allows nouns, and only nouns, to appear in these positions. The first frame accepts singular form nouns, like girl, spaghetti, and furniture, while the second frame accepts plural form, like trees, pants and police. Still, of course, there is o guarantee that the result will be sensible: The torture was nice doesn’t sound very normal, but it’s cleary grammatical, and so torture is a noun.
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Phonetics Phonology Morphology Semantics Syntax Sociolinguistics Language Society
posted by Rini Ekayati :: Linguistics :: @ 1:35 PM
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