noun (n.) (n, N)

A term used in the GRAMMATICAL classification of WORDS, traditionally defined 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, then, 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.

The CONSTRUCTIONS into which nouns most commonly enter, and of which they are the HEAD word, are generally called noun phrases (NP) or NOMINAL GROUPS. The structure of a noun phrase consists minimally of the noun (or noun substitute, such as a PRONOUN); the constructions preceding and following the noun are often described under the headings of PREMODIFICATION and POSTmodification respectively. There are many derived notions, including COMPLEX NPs, HEAVY NPs and NP-MOVEMENT. Noun incorporation is found in some languages (such as Iroquoian languages), where a generic noun (e.g. ‘vehicle’) is syntactically included within a verb, thereby cross-classifying a specific noun (e.g. ‘car’) that is governed by the verb.