Nouns

Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper nouns and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs. frog, milk) or as concrete nouns and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs. heat, prejudice).

Definite nouns include all proper nouns, all nouns in "construct state" and all nouns which are prefixed by the definite article /al-/.

Swahili employs sixteen: six classes that usually indicate singular nouns, five classes that usually indicate plural nouns, a class for abstract nouns, a class for verbal infinitives used as nouns and three classes to indicate location.

As many have noted, it is possible to provide an alternative analysis, by which mass nouns and plural count nouns are assigned a similar semantics, as distinct from that of singular count nouns.

Collective nouns main Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are inflected for the singular – refer to groups consisting of more than one individual or entity.

For example within nouns there are two sub classes, concrete nouns and abstract nouns.

If, instead, we had chosen to characterize count nouns as quantized nouns, and mass nouns as non-quantized ones, then we would (incorrectly) be led to expect committee to be a mass noun.

Khmer nouns are divided into two groups: mass nouns, those which take classifiers, and specific nouns, which do not.

Many nouns can actually function as members of two genders or even all three, and the gender classes of English nouns are usually determined by their agreement with pronouns, rather than marking on the nouns themselves.

Mass nouns or uncountable (or non-count) nouns differ from count nouns in precisely that respect: they cannot take plurals or combine with number words or the above type of quantifiers.

One may say that mass nouns that are used as count nouns are "countified" and that count ones that are used as mass nouns are "massified".

On such accounts, count nouns should then be characterized as non-cumulative nouns: this characterization correctly groups committee together with the count nouns.

Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns (the Mozart experience; his Azores adventure), or in the role of common nouns (he's no Pavarotti; a few would-be Napoleons).

The gender of animate nouns is generally natural (i.e. nouns referring to men are generally masculine, and vice versa), but for nonanimate nouns it is arbitrary.

The is the most commonly used word in the English language, accounting for 7% of all words. citation "The" can be used with both singular and plural nouns, with nouns of any gender, and with nouns that start with any letter.

Thus the distinction between mass and count nouns should not be made in terms of what sorts of things the nouns refer to, but rather in terms of how the nouns present these entities.

Adjectives that come after copular verbs are predicate adjectives, and nouns that come after linking verbs are predicate nouns.

All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin (e.g. a mor – a mō rem "love") have not survived.

Although it differentiates a small number of male and female nouns, such as patro (father) and patrino (mother) for the reason described above, most nouns are gender-neutral and the use of it is not necessary.

Although similar to incorporated nouns, lexical affixes differ in that they never occur as freestanding nouns, i.e. they always appear as affixes.