noun (Q15618): Difference between revisions

A term used in the grammatical classification of words, traditionally defines as the "name of a person, place or thing," but the vagueness associated with the notions of "name" and "thing" (e.g. is 'beauty' a thing?) has led linguistic descriptions to analyze this class in terms of the formal and functional criteria of syntax and morphology. In linguistic terms, nouns are items which display certain types of inflection (e.g. of case or number), have a specific distribution (e.g. they may follow prepositions but not, say, modals), and perform a specific syntactic function (e.g. as subject or object of a sentence). Nouns are generally subclassified into common and proper types, and analyzed in terms of number, gender, case and countability. [Crystal 2008: 320]