Grammar and Punctuation: Lesson 2, Part 1 · 1:07am Jan 22nd, 2017

Persons, Places, Things, and Stuff: Nouns

In This Lesson
• All kinds of nouns!: proper, common, collective, noncount, and singular and plural
• Direct objects and object complements
• Subject, object, and possessive case

You gotta love nouns! These words used for things and stuff are probably the first new words spoken in any language. Nouns are among the first words babies learn when beginning to speak. Our lives are filled with things and concepts that can only be identified by using nouns.

Speaking in grammatical terms, nouns are about as basic and straightforward as words get. Even so, nouns have a few tricky parts that give people trouble. And apart from any confusion stemming from nouns themselves, it's good to have a clear understanding of the nominal (nounlike) elements of speech because so many other parts of speech relate to them. So, if you're just getting acquainted or reacquainted with your ol' pal grammar, nouns are a good place to "break the ice".

This lesson talks primarily about the various ways thing-words and stuff-words can fit into a sentence and how they can change form according to their place and function.

The Renown of Nouns!

You've probably heard of that maxim that says a noun is a word that represents a person, place, or thing. What's more, the things nouns represent include not only ordinary, real, material things such as refrigerators, parking lots, and tree frogs, but also imaginary things, abstract things, and things that are actually stuff. Any word that makes sense with an article (a, an, or be) in front of it is a noun.

Note: Some nouns derive from other parts of speech. For example, the nouns transcendence, longing, corruption, and five-mile hike come from the verbs "to transcend," "to long for," "to corrupt," and "to hike." The nouns falsehood, sanity, roundness, and pragmatism come from the adjectives "false," "sane," "round," and "pragmatic." Conversely, words that start off as nouns can change into other parts of speech. Doglike, flaky, and erroneous are adjectives made from the nouns "dog," "flake," and "error."

A few aspects of nouns can give some people trouble. Here is a list of the troublemakers in the order in they're dealt with in this lesson:

• Capitalization. Some nouns, namely proper nouns, get capitalized even when they don't begin a sentence. Examples: Mount Kilimanjaro, Statue of Liberty, Elm Street, Saturn, and Webster's Intermediate Dictionary.
• Plural Forms. That simple and tidy rule of adding an s at the end of a noun when you're talking about more than one thing doesn't always work. Deal with it! Then, once you've got the right form of the noun, how do you know the right verb form that goes with it? Noncount nouns and collective nouns come into play here.
• Case. All nouns take one of three different case forms, subject, object, or possessive. Case forms are crucial for understanding pronouns (which will be discussed in Lesson 3).

Note: Subject case is the form of nouns and pronouns that indicates that the noun or pronoun carries out the action described by the verb. Object case is the form that indicates that the noun or pronoun receives the action described by the verb. Possessive case is the form that indicates that the noun or pronoun possesses a thing or quality.

Common Versus One-of-a-Kind (Proper) Nouns

Nouns can be proper or common. A proper noun names a one-of-a-kind thing. Okay, yes, there is more than one Pablo or Justin in the world, but those are still specific names for specific, one-of-a-kind people. No matter how many John Johnsons there are, each one is a one-of-a-kind thing.

Note: Ever wish we could just get by using only nouns alone and chucking all those other annoying parts of speech? In Jonathan Swift's famous satirical fable, Gulliver's Travels (1735), the wandering Gulliver visits the land of Balnibari, where professors of language are at work expunging everything but nouns from their native tongue. Another group of Balnibari professors go even further and propose using actual things instead of words. People would simply carry around with them everything they might want to talk about. Swift is making fun of eighteenth-century academics who wanted to make language more scientific!

More proper nouns include United States, Lamborghini, British Royal Air Force, and Pacific Ocean. Notice how they're all capitalized? Capitalize proper nouns no matter their placement in a sentence.

Most nouns, however, are common nouns. (No, common nouns are not improper; they're just common. ) Hair, emeralds, keys, time, whatever---things and stuff that have words for what they are but don't have their own specific names are common nouns.

Things Alone, Things Together---and Stuff

Nouns can be singular, plural, or cellective, depending on whether they refer to one thing, many things, or a group of things acting as a unit. A singular noun names a single thing, such as a crayon, elevator, or hemorrhoid. Single nouns, unlike plural nouns, can take the articles a or an, as in a kaleidoscope or an octopus. A plural noun refers to more than one thing, such as several hippopatami or some rectangles.

Rules (Plural) for Making Nouns Plural

Notice the unusual form of the plural noun hippopatami in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph? Well, typically, we make a singular noun into a plural noun by adding an s onto the end of it; thus, crayon is singular but crayons is plural. Many nouns, however, change to the plural form in other ways. It's possible to have one child or many children, work in one medium or several media, get attacked by one ferocious hippopotamus or a whole thundering herd of hippopatami, and hop away on one foot or two feet. (I'm so sorry for using hippopatami again. )

Kind of complicated, isn't it? What's more, some nouns can become plural without changing at all. In poker, two pair beats one pair. You might think a flock of sheep all descended from a single shoop(), but, uh, that's not how it is. It's still one sheep.

Ready for a simple, logical, reliable rule that will tell you which nouns become plural by adding s and which nouns become plural some other way? Well, I've got some bad news for you: there isn't any such rule.

In fact, the English language has borrowed words from many different languages in the course of its development, and each of those languages has a different way to form plural nouns. Singular/plural forms such as datum/data and antenna/antennae come from Latin; ox/oxen and man/men are Germanic.

Regardless of where they come from, these words are part of the English language now.

Many of these plural forms of nouns have to be learned on a case-by-case basis. That's why there's spell check, dictionaries, and English teachers!

Getting Stuff-y

Many nouns refer to groups of things regardless of whether the noun is singular or plural. These are called collective nouns. They include words like conglomeration, committee, party, group, and flock.

Finally, there's one more category for nouns that are neither singular, plural, nor collective. These are noncount nouns. Noncount nouns are words for things that can't be counted because they are stuff. Ooze, richness, chalk, ambition, and phegm are all noncount nouns. Many nouns, such as hair, cheese, and error, can be used as noncount nouns or singular nouns. For example, the word hair occurs as a plural noun and also as a noncount noun in the following two sentences:

The mole on my chin has three hairs growing out of it.

My hair is brown.

Both collective nouns and noncount nouns generally function as singular nouns as far as the structure of a sentence goes. They take the singular form of the verb when they appear as the subject of a sentence. (I suppose we can discuss more about verb forms in Lesson 4. In the next part of this lesson we'll talk about subjects of sentences.)

Note: We use two more conceptually useful categories for nouns: abstract and concrete. Concrete nouns refer to tangible things that can be measured or sensed, such as elephants and electrons. Abstract nouns refer to intangible things such as beauty, clarity, and torpor.

Well, that's it for this lesson, or at least this part. Too much information in one post is harder to understand and remember. In the next part, we'll discuss the few things left undefined from this part. (My back is killing me.)

The next part for this lesson will be coming soon, so hang around and do something until it's ready. See you there!

~Flutterbawse

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