Questions tagged [nouns]
A category of word which typically denotes an entity of some kind.
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Is there a linguistic notion of a "static" vs "dynamic" noun?
I would have typed a clearer question in the title, but it would have been way too long.
By "static," I mean a word or phrase that refers to one object, and one object only. ex.
The Eiffel Tower
The ...
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Infinitive clauses referring to an adjective before a noun [closed]
We know that infinitive clauses can sometimes refer to adjectives before nouns. I feel with what adjectives they can do that, but I don't have any reason for it.
Examples;
You can buy the best book ...
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Formal semantics (Montague, type-theoretical) of noun clauses
Partee has nice summary about the formal semantics of relative clause http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05Lec10.pdf (subordinate adjectival clause). E.g.
At least one boy who Mary loves is ...
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Is there a language that has temporal noun modifiers?
I am not a linguist, so my question is most probably very poorly worded. I have obviously searched on google, but to no avail. Is there a language that has noun declensions or suffixes/affixes that ...
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Do all languages use Proper Nouns?
I'm currently building an alien language that I'm trying not to base on English or basically Europe in general, because that's what cool these days, right?
Anyway, what I think proper nouns are is a ...
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What is the exact meaning of 'common' in 'common noun'?
The adjective 'common' has two basic meanings according to Oxford:
Occurring, found, or done often; prevalent: ‘common misspellings’
Shared by, coming from, or done by two or more people, groups, or ...
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Is there a term for an adjective or noun becoming a verb, like "to adult"?
Is there a term for a word that is traditionally an adjective or noun becoming a verb over time? A word I'm thinking of is "adult", which Merriam-Webster has reported has become increasingly ...
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A subset of concrete nouns
As far as I know, common nouns include all the nouns except for proper nouns. Specifically, common nouns include abstract nouns as well as concrete nouns, which include material nouns and collective ...
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What do you call what a noun phrase refers to?
In most dictionaries and grammars, 'noun phrase' is defined by the function it performs, i.e., a subject, an object or a predicative complement. But this definition is not quite helpful considering ...
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Tests for determining NP status
What are the tests for determining whether a noun is part of a full NP or if it is simply a noun?
I'm aware of tests for nounhood generally (plural, formation of an NP with a or the, modification by ...
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How do I decline a noun phrase?
First, let me say that I'm bad at grammar. Everything I know about grammar I've learned because I want to make my own languages.
Second, I've created an ergative-absolutive language (I'm learning as ...
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Is there a technical term for the phenomenon of two usual nouns A and B such that the concatenation A B denotes neither an A nor a B?
Question. (The title hopefully states the abstract question in full.)
Additional question: do you know more examples, possibly even clearer examples than "electron cloud" below.
Remarks.
An example ...
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Are there languages without words for "father" or "mother" but only "parent"?
I'd like to know if there are languages where there aren't words for father and mother, but for parent, and how one would say [something like] this to their father in that language: where's mom?
I ...
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How to know whether a word is context appropriate? [closed]
So as we all know in both Englisch und Deutsch there are many nouns/verbs that either mean the same or close to the same as eachother, but are chosen based on the context (ex: damp, moist, soggy, etc.....
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Why is there no Ancient Greek noun whose stem ends in an "i"-ending diphthong (like "-ai")?
Ancient Greek nouns are cassified into three declensions, and we can say that this is largely based on the ending of the stem of the noun. If a noun's stem ends in -ā (or -ē in Attic when not after r, ...
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Is a language possible without verbs or without nouns?
Is a language without nouns possible? And another one without verbs?
And other ones without adjectives or adverbs?
Is there some real examples? (In preference: non-constructed languages, because ...
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Term for -ed as an adjectival suffix?
By which I mean changing a noun into an adjective by adding '-ed'.
For example: the noun 'horn' becomes the adjective 'horned'
Is there a term for the type of adjective that is formed from a noun by ...
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Do other languages than English have verbals ,too?
As I understand it, verbals are nouns,adjectives and adverbs which are derived from verbs.
I don't understand if a verbal is indeed one of the three parts of speeches mentioned or a part of speech of ...
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Reciprocal Pronouns (one another, each other) and Head Noun
I have a question about Reciprocal Pronouns (a part of the category anaphors). I can't seem to find the entire answer that I am looking for anywhere, so I'll ask here. I have tried to make my question ...
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Find head noun, "he himself"
I have run into a problem when I am trying to find the head noun for a NP in this sentence. I haven't been able to find any rules explaining why one of them would be head, or if they even belong in ...
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When analyzing a set of corpora, are there any standard practices with regard to the classification of gerunds?
In the article, "How Many Words Do You Need to Know in Spanish (or any other foreign language)? And WHICH Words Should You Be Learning?" I came upon the following:
“Assume that a language learner ...
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Term for nouns strung together by conjunctions
In the sentence:
Men, women and children are people.
What is the term for the combination of nouns and conjunctions found in the subject position?
"Compound noun" doesn't quite seem to fit the ...
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What is the "headedness" of Germanic noun phrases?
Some casual reading of the literature shows that noun phrases in languages such as Afrikaans, English, Swedish, German etc. are more head-final than head-initial. While it is easy to show that non of ...
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Languages with a grammatical distinction between abstract and concrete nouns
Are there any languages making a grammatical distinction between abstract and concrete nouns?
I suppose this should boil down to the question about the existence of languages having a morpheme ...
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Are there any languages with minimal distinctions between the noun and verb categories?
Are there any languages in which the, largely Indo-European/PIE, and more compartmentalized parts-of-speech system don't work very well? In particular, I am wondering if there are any languages in ...
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collection of derivative nouns
I am a researcher in Computational Linguistics. Recently, my research interests led me towards the analysis derivative nouns, specifically nouns derived from other nouns. For example, India to Indian, ...
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Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?
In German, one capitalizes the nouns in a sentence. In the video Life in Germany - Ep. 42: English vs. German, an American claims that capitalizing the nouns makes it easier to understand a sentence.
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Is the word the name of a person or an adjective? [closed]
I don't know hebrew and I was reading a transliteration of the following phrase,
"חכו ממתקים וכלו מחמדים זה דודי וזה רעי בנות ירושלם׃"
Is the word "מחמדים" referring to a person name or an adjective ...
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Nouns without an article as in e.g. "Empire is not always a good thing"
Consider the highlighted nouns below.
Empire is not always a good thing. (The burden of empire, like its benefit, was not equitably shared.)
Some great apes have theory of mind. (Theory may tell us ...
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Declension of the word "water" (maim) in Hebrew? [closed]
What is the conjugated (that is used in smikhut) form of the word "maim" (water)? Is it "maim" or "mai"? (I'm asking about ancient biblical Hebrew, but I am almost sure it is the same as in modern ...
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Who was the first to call noun classes "genders"?
I'm not asking about the origin of grammatical gender. I am asking where is the earliest example of the term "gender" used to describe classes of nouns. I'm wondering who first decided to name ...
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Finding the corresponding noun given an adjective
I am developing a Question and Answer system in the Dutch language. In order to get an answer from the system I send a query to DBPedia which either returns me answer or does not. Sentences like: "...
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Why do languages have gendered nouns?
Why do languages have gendered nouns? What are the problems that are solved by having gendered nouns?
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Can we form a statement in english with verb without noun
I am working on NLP project, I saw during processing of large number of documents that there is always a noun either before or after a verb and both are strongly related.
I just need to verify my ...
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Can a personal adjective be categorized as a noun phrase?
In 'File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness' by Irene Heim, she calls 'its' in 'Every cat ate its food' a type of definite NP. Could a possessive adjective be classified as a ...
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noun phrase types
What are (1) [NP e], (2) control PRO; pro, other instances, and (3) 'e' in the examples? ('NP' here is actually a subscript in the paper)
I'm reading Barbara Abott's 'Definiteness and Indefiniteness.'...
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How can case systems emerge diachronically?
This questions applies only to the languages which originally did not feature noun case systems and developed it over time through various sound, morphological and syntactical changes.
By a case ...
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Are there languages that form noun singulars by adding suffixes to plurals, rather than vice versa?
In languages that express grammatical number in nouns with suffixes, usually there is either a suffix added to an unsuffixed singular to form the plural (cat—cats), or the suffix (or inflectional ...
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What electronic resources are available that categorize nouns by countability?
Most electronic dictionaries I've found only categorize words into noun / verb / adjective / adverb / etc. (such as WordNet). They don't further refine parts of speech into subcategories like count/...
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Proper vs. common nouns: Are there more differences, esp. in grammar, than capital letter and simpler plural?
Proper nouns in English have a capital starting letter and the plural is simpler (e.g. -y ending gets -ys instead of -ies).
Are there any other differences? Especially when analysing/parsing the ...
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Has grammatical gender ever been observed to emerge in a language that previously had none?
Does a language exist whose older forms are known to have lacked the category of grammatical gender, and which proceeded to evolve one (perhaps from a non-gender-based system of noun classes)? Are "...
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Does any linguist honestly believe that nouns and verbs are not universals?
Does any serious scholar really believe that some languages have no distinction between verbs and nouns?
Wikipedia pages suggest this. I studied physics, so linguistics is not my field at all.
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Trying to understand why adjectives do not refer
[Question rewritten and retitled, now that I have a better understanding of what I didn't understand, due to comments]
This is probably information I could find on the Internet elsewhere, but I am ...
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Word commonly tagged as noun but use as verb
Given a sentence "Someone has to walk the shore and map the island, see what else there is". The "map" word is a verb, but it's commonly used as noun, i.e., in most of dictionaries, the first word ...
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Is pronoun a subset of nouns when referring to parts of speech?
To be frank, I am very unsure about this, but having two sets and not knowing how they relate, there are four possibilities so far:
nouns and pronouns are own sets without any connection between them
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Given a verb get a noun that corresponds to subject or object
I have verbs and I would like to find their corresponding noun for either subject or object.
e.g.
run:subject -> runner
kill:subject -> killer
kill:object -> dead
I also would have groups of them
e....
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Are there other words that behave like "weather" in English?
I have been looking at how nouns behave with determiners and plurals and such. So things like mass, count, and collective nouns. One oddball that I have found is "weather", and I am wondering if there ...
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The suffix -er in English: Why is this derivational?
A typical charactersitic of inflectional suffixes is that they are productive (can occur on many words) and obligatory (are required by virtue of certain grammatical constraints). Simplistic though ...
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Is this nominal suffix more inflectional or derivational?
So, I'm working on this conlang as part of my work and the deliverable is a simple grammar. To facilitate reference, I've divided up the suffixes between inflectional and derivational forms. But of ...
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What sort of morpheme is this suffix meaning ‘about'?
Some background: This is a conlang that I'm developing as part of my job. It's a difficult task, but I want to make it as realistic as possible. I have to make a detailed grammar so that other ...
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