CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3
1 Nouns…………………………………………………………………………….5

1 Noun phrases……………………………………………………..........5

2 What makes a word a noun?....................................................................6

1. General characteristics of the Noun…………………………………..10 2. Subcategorization of the Noun…………………………………….....10 3. Grammatical categories of the Noun…………………………….…..13 4. Irregular Plural Nouns………………………………………………..19
2 The usage of derived abstract nouns in “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens…….22
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………....29
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………30

INTRODUCTION

The word "noun" comes from the latin nomen meaning "name." Word classes like nouns were first described by Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax, and defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns can be inflected for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative. Verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected for tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns cannot. Aristotle also had a notion of onomata (nouns) and rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly correspond our notions of verbs and nouns. Expressions of natural language will have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they can take, and what kinds of other expressions they can combine with. but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of nouns on the top of this page is thus a formal definition. That definition is uncontroversial, and has the advantage that it allows us to effectively