Ifes - Gramática Inglesa I - Grupo: Giacoboni, Maira; Martin, Daniela;

Stelzer Adriana; Chirra Silvia. Octubre 2018.

What is a noun?
Nouns are LEXICAL WORDS They carry meaning.
They name a:
PERSON PLACE THING IDEA
Nouns can be described in terms of
their:
❏ Morphological criteria ✓

❏ Semantic criteria ✓

❏ Syntactic or distributional ✓

criteria
Morphological Criteria
❏ Single morpheme: book, cat, boy, etc.
❏ Complex structure created by:
➢ Inflectional process (plural and genitive case)

Dog Dogs The dog’s tail

Glass Glasses My cousins’ house

Party Parties

Knife Knives
 Morphological Criteria
➢ Derivational process

Prefixes: ex + president changes meaning

Suffixes: employ + ment changes word class

➢ Compounding

Noun + Noun girlfriend

Adjective + Noun goldfish
Verb + Noun cookbook
Adv/Prep + Noun onlooker
Semantic Criteria

NOUN

PROPER COMMON

COUNTABLE UNCOUNTABLE

ABSTRACT CONCRETE ABSTRACT CONCRETE

 Proper Nouns: Abstract Nouns:
- They are capitalized.
- They are specific names. - They denote an abstract
- Articles cannot be used quality, state or action.
with them. - They have no physical
Common Nouns: existence.
- They are common names. - Articles cannot be used
- Articles can be used with with them.
nouns. - They cannot be felt with
- They have plural forms. senses.
- They are not capitalized.
 Concrete Nouns:
- They have physical shapes.
- They can be touched, seen, tasted and felt.
Collective Nouns:
- They stand for a collection of things considered as one whole.
Countable Nouns:
- They have plural forms.
- They can be counted.
Uncountable Nouns:
- They cannot be counted.
- They have no plural forms.
 Syntactic Criteria: Syntactic Role
❏ Nouns occur as the head of a Noun Phrase
❏ Common nouns can be modified by many kinds of words,
both before and after them.
❏ Proper nouns rarely have any modifiers.
❏ They function as:
● Subject of a verb
● Object of a verb
● Complement of a verb
● Object of a preposition
Syntactic Criteria: Syntactic Role
❏ Examples

1. John teaches English in China.

2. I kicked the ball.

3. The man is a trader.

4. Let us go with John.

What is a Noun Phrase?
An NP is a word or group of
words that contains a noun and
functions as a subject, object of
verbs or prepositional object.

The words in the phrase add meaning to or “expand” the

noun.
The Noun Phrase
A Noun Phrase can consist of:

➢ NOUN: Mary is beautiful. / Dogs are cute.

➢ PRONOUN: She is beautiful. / They are cute.
➢ DETERMINER + NOUN: A book / That girl / My book
➢ QUANTIFIER + DETERMINER + NOUN: All these years.
➢ DETERMINER + QUANTIFIER + NOUN: My first book.
➢ ADJECTIVE + NOUN: Beautiful flowers.
➢ DETERMINER + ADJECTIVE + NOUN: Those nice girls.
➢ QUANTIFIER + ADJECTIVE + NOUN: Many boring books.
➢ Q + ADVERB + ADJ + N: Many extremely boring books.
We can analyse NOUNS in terms of its:

❏ Morphology
✓
❏ Semantics ✓
❏ Sintax ✓

The famous actress from London bought the box case for her

friend from an antique seller.