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In linguistics, a noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other kinds of expressions. Since different languages have different inventories of kinds of expressions, the definition of noun will differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can co-occur with definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. The noun can be replaced by a pronoun of first person, second person, or even third person. Also the noun is known for being one of the eight parts of speech. The word comes from the Latin nomen meaning "name". Word classes like nouns were first described by the Sanskrit grammarian Pa?ini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax; and were defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns inflect for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative. Verbs, on the other hand, inflect for tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns do not. Aristotle also had a notion of onomata (nouns) and rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly correspond with modern notions of nouns and verbs.[citation needed] Nouns are words that describe person, place, thing, animal or abstract idea.[1] Expressions of natural language have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they take and what kinds of other expressions they combine with; but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of a noun at the outset of this page is thus a formal, traditional grammatical definition. That definition, for the most part, is considered uncontroversial and furnishes the propensity for certain language users to effectively distinguish most nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns as words that are modified by definite articles. There are also several attempts of defining nouns in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are discussed below. In traditional school grammars, one often encounters the definition of nouns that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition. It has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.[citation needed] Contemporary linguists generally agree that one cannot successfully define nouns (or other grammatical categories) in terms of what sort of object in the world they refer to or signify. Part of the conundrum is that the definition makes use of relatively general nouns ("thing", "phenomenon", "event") to define what nouns are. The existence of such general nouns demonstrates that nouns refer to entities that are organized in taxonomic hierarchies. But other kinds of expressions are also organized into such structured taxonomic relationships. For example the verbs "stroll", "saunter", "stride", and "tread" are more specific words than the more general "walk". Moreover, "walk" is more specific than the verb "move", which, in turn, is less general than "change". But it is unlikely that such taxonomic relationships can be used to define nouns and verbs. We cannot define verbs as those words that refer to "changes" or "states", for example, because the nouns change and state probably refer to such things, but, of course, aren't verbs. Similarly, nouns like "invasion", "meeting", or "collapse" refer to things that are "done" or "happen". In fact, an influential theory has it that verbs like "kill" or "die" refer to events,[2][3] which is among the sort of thing that nouns are supposed to refer to. The point being made here is not that this view of verbs is wrong, but rather that this property of verbs is a poor basis for a definition of this category, just like the property of having wheels is a poor basis for a definition of cars (some things that have wheels, such as my suitcase or a jumbo jet, aren't cars). Similarly, adjectives like "yellow" or "difficult" might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like "outside" or "upstairs" seem to refer to places, which are also among the sorts of things nouns can refer to. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, and nouns aren't verbs, adjectives or adverbs. One might argue that "definitions" of this sort really rely on speakers' prior intuitive knowledge of what nouns, verbs and adjectives are, and, so don't really add anything over and beyond this. Speakers' intuitive knowledge of such things might plausibly be based on formal criteria, such as the traditional grammatical definition of English nouns aforementioned.
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Proper Noun Subcategories
Proper Noun Articles
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