PARTS OF SPEECH

Mrs. Leidelen M. Telegrapo

Instructor in English Plus

NOUNS• The term noun comes from the

Latin word nomen (“name”) and that the traditional definition of a noun is that it is the name of a person, a place, a thing, an abstract quality or a collective group.

• They denote either whole classes of physical objects such as cats, people, tables, clouds, houses, trees, fish, atoms, stars and so on or particular individual objects.

CLASSES OF NOUNS

1. Proper Nouns. A proper noun is a word or sequence of several words identifying some particular individual person, place, event or thing. A proper name can stand on its own as a noun phrase. Typically, English proper names are spelled beginning with capital letters

Examples: John, Henry, Helsinki, Hurfurd, Rover, Dublin, New York, San Francisco, Robert Louis Stevenson, Watergate, Waterloo, Mars, Alpha, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet (the play)

2. Common Nouns. A common noun is a type of noun which can be used to refer to member of classes of people, things or masses of stuff. The same common noun used in different context can pick out different individual people or things. As the name suggests, common nouns are the most common type of noun. Typically, English common nouns are not spelled with an initial capital letter.

Examples: apple, desks, elephant, girls, hatred, intersexuality, phenomenon, sky, soil, town, mall, weather

3. Mass Nouns. Mass nouns refer to stuff or unsegmented material dealt. They denote the following:

• Intangible things like gases, such as air, oxygen, etc.

• Material things that are not countable, such as liquids, e. g. water, oil, milk, wine and ink

• Material things with particles too small to be counted like dust, dirt, salt and rice

• Aggregates or sets that are thought of as one unit, like luggage, furniture, jewelry, equipment and machinery

4. Count Nouns. A count noun is a type of common noun which can be used to refer to an individual object or to the objects in a countable collection rather than to a mass of indivisible stuff.

Examples: apple, barn, envelope, mountain, principle

Count nouns have both singular and plural forms, so lamp is a count noun as it has a plural form lamps. In English, the quantifiers many and few occur modifying count nouns, but not mass nouns.

5. Collective Nouns. Collective nouns refer to a number of people or group of similar objects who come together and taken as a single unit.

Examples: audience, board, club, committee, congregation, council, crew, crowd, faculty, gang, government, group, jury, parliament, party, team

We also have:• flock (of birds, sheep)• herd ( of cattle, deer, elephants)• pack ( of wolves, jackals)• school (of fish)• swarm (of flying insects)

6. Abstract Nouns. Abstract nouns are nouns that typically refer to abstraction, such as activities, emotion, virtues, vices, force, ideologies, religions, attitude, times, distances, and professions. Generally, the things referred to by abstract nouns are ones that we can sensibly talk about, so they do exist in some sense, but cannot experience them directly with our senses.

Examples: courage, envy, intelligence, bigotry, war, love, fear, gravity, communism, emotion, force, optimism, inertia, philanthropy, month, mile, patience, faith, dependence, humility

7. Concrete Nouns. In contrast to abstract nouns, concrete nouns have physical forms; they can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted or heard. They occupy space.

Examples: books, computers, cassette player, car, aquarium, decorations, doll, fan