(Q15618)
Statements
part of speech in grammar denoting a figurative or real thing or person
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A substantive is a member of the syntactic class in which the names of physical, concrete, relatively unchanging experiences are most typically found whose members may act as subjects and objects, and most of whose members have inherently determined grammatical gender (in languages which inflect for gender) [Crystal 1997,264; Givon 1984,51-52; Payne 1997,33].
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]
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21 August 2021
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