English Language Booklet of Word Terminology and Examples

8397 Words34 Pages
WORD CLASSES WORD CLASSES ENGLISH LANGUAGE LUKE CLARKE NOUNS NOUNS DEFINITION: The part of speech (or word class) that is used to name or identify a person, place, thing, quality, or action. E.g. Man, Mountain, State, Ocean, Country, Building, Cat, and Airline. EXAMPLE: The MAN was very tall. (MAN being the noun of the sentence) TYPES OF NOUNS: PROPER NOUNS Proper nouns are nouns that refer to specific entities. Writers of English capitalize proper nouns like Nebraska, Steve, Harvard, or White House to show their distinction from common nouns. COMMON NOUNS Common nouns refer to general, unspecific categories of entities. Whereas Nebraska is a proper noun because it signifies a specific state, the word state itself is a common noun because it can refer to any of the 50 states in the United States. Harvard refers to a particular institution of higher learning, while the common noun university can refer to any such institution. COUNTABLE NOUNS To linguists, these count nouns can occur in both single and plural forms, can be modified by numerals, and can co-occur with quantificational determiners like many, most, more, several, etc. For example, the noun bike is a countable noun. Consider the following sentence: There is a bike in that garage. In this example, the word bike is singular as it refers to one bike that is presently residing in a particular garage. However, bike can also occur in the plural form. There are six broken bikes in that garage. In this example, the noun bikes refer to more than one bike as it is being modified by the numeral six. In addition, countable nouns can co-occur with quantificational determiners. In that garage, several bikes are broken. This sentence is grammatical, as the noun bike can take the modification of the quantificational determiner several. UNCOUNTABLE NOUNS OR

More about English Language Booklet of Word Terminology and Examples

Open Document