Grammar for Grown-ups

WHAT ARE THEY?

A noun is often described as a word representing a person, animal or thing. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a little difficult to see how that can include words like effectiveness, imagination and inevitability. A more promising indication is the word’s appearance. In those last three examples the endings -ness, -ion, and -ability announce that we are in the presence of a noun and many nouns also add ’s to show possession or attribution (dog’s), s to indicate the plural (dogs) and s’ to indicate the possessive plural.

However, the most reliable indicator of the class to which a word belongs is its syntactic role, the way it behaves in a sentence. A noun can be preceded by a definite or indefinite article, an adjective or by other determiners. Most noticeably, if a word is the subject or object of a sentence it will typically be a noun.

DIFFERENT TYPES

Nouns can be countable or uncountable; abstract or concrete; common or proper.

Table, boy, book, mountain and house are countable. They can be preceded by either the definite or indefinite article and other determiners and have plurals. Weather, thoughtfulness, gold, Arctic and music are uncountable. They can be preceded only by the definite article and do not have plurals. Some nouns can be countable in one context and uncountable in another. When we refer to beer in general it’s uncountable, but when we want some we can say Let’s go and have a couple of beers.

From those examples, it’s easy to see that table, say, is concrete: a table is something we can touch and bump into. Thoughtfulness, on the other hand, is not something we can touch and bump into, because it’s abstract.

Finally, the one noun in the examples that is not a common noun is Arctic. It’s the name of a particular place. By contrast, there are many mountains, and so mountain is a common noun.