A category of word which typically denotes an entity of some kind.
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21 views
Are there conditions under which Georgian nouns omit the “-ი” case ending?
In Georgian most nouns in the nominative case end with "-ი" (-i), most other nouns end in another vowel.
In cases other than the nominative this ending may be replaced with a different ending but the ...
3
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0answers
41 views
What is “contacting case”?
According to Wikipedia, the Bats language of Eastern Georgia has a case called "contacting", but no description is offered as to its function.
I checked the Russian and Georgian versions of the page ...
3
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0answers
76 views
What are the constituent morphemes in 'preposition'?
The word preposition. I am trying to break down a series of words into their constituent morphemes and am having trouble with the word 'preposition'.
I can obviously see that the 'pre-' is a morpheme ...
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0answers
42 views
Is there any universal semantic coding for noun cases similar to verb aspectology?
I am aware of the argument/actant theories, but perhaps there is something like universal semantical coding for the nouns as well.
For Argument concepts,you can see the relevant Wikipedia page for ...
3
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2answers
123 views
Affix that makes nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns?
I have a friend studying a language from the pacific islands, and she found an affix that when added to a noun makes a verb and when added to a verb makes a noun. What would you call such a thing, and ...
6
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2answers
109 views
Is there are strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs?
Is there a strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs? If so, what would be an example of a phrase structure for a uniclausal ...
2
votes
2answers
156 views
Are there agglutinative languages without a propensity for long compound nouns?
I've noticed a propensity for agglutinating languages to also permit quite long compound nouns. Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian certainly have them and I've been finding a few now that I'm trying to ...
9
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4answers
318 views
How are proper nouns distinguished from other nouns in linguistics (not in orthography)?
When you ask most people the difference between common nouns and proper nouns they mostly can only tell you that proper nouns start with a capital letter.
But this has problems:
Capital letters and ...
10
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2answers
293 views
What determines how noun compounds are formed in a language?
In English and other Germanic languages, noun compounds are formed simply by “appending” the nouns in a certain order. For example, phrases like this are very common:
electricity price ...
10
votes
6answers
1k views
What's the global difference between nouns and verbs?
Is there a way to distinguish nouns and verbs that applies to all languages?
This problem has been occupying my mind for some time now. I'm not quite sure how to approach this question, so I'll just ...
9
votes
5answers
363 views
“Overabundant nouns” in Italian: do they exist in other languages?
Under my answer to that question, I talked about a category of nouns that exist in Italian. The italian name is "Nomi sovrabbondanti" or "sostantivi sovrabbondanti", the meaning is roughly ...
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8answers
476 views
Is the countable vs mass noun distinction common outside English?
English makes a difference between count nouns (also known as countable nouns) and mass nouns (also known as uncountable nouns).
Count noun: One cat, two cats, few cats.
Mass noun: Some information, ...
