Nouns denote both concrete objects and abstract entities:
Concrete Abstract
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
book anger
chair difficulty
dog eagerness
grass history
lake information
house progress
tree terror
Many nouns can be identified by their characteristic endings:
-ence absence, difference, evidence, experience
-ment embarrassment, experiment, government, treatment
-tion education, information, situation, vegetation
-ism defeatism, optimism, populism, symbolism
Singular and plural nouns
Most nouns have two forms, a singular form and a plural form. Regular nouns form the plural by adding -s to the singular:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
boy boys
table tables
However, some very frequent nouns have irregular plurals:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
man men
woman women
child children
foot feet
goose geese
mouse mice
tooth teeth
sheep sheep
The distinction between singular and plural is called number contrast.
Common and proper nouns
Proper nouns are the names of individual people and places, including geographical features such as roads, rivers, mountains and oceans:
Patrick Hong Kong
Nelson Mandela Euston Road
China Atlantic Ocean
Paris River Thames
New Delhi Mount Everest
The names of institutions, newspapers, buildings and ships are also proper nouns:
The Wall Street Journal London Underground
The Royal Albert Hall Titanic
Harvard University Mayflower
Millennium Dome
Finally, proper nouns include the days of the week, the months of the year and other periods of the calendar:
Monday Christmas
Tuesday Passover
January Ramadan
February Thanksgiving
Proper nouns are written with an initial capital (upper-case) letter. All other nouns are common nouns. Since proper nouns usually refer to unique individuals, places, or events in the calendar, they do not normally have a plural form. However, they may take a plural ending when numberis specifically being referred to:
There are two Patricks in my class.
Countable and uncountable nouns
Singular nouns denote just one instance, while plural nouns denote more than one instance:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
one boy two boys, three boys, four boys . . .
one day two days, three days, four days . . .
one computer two computers, three computers, four
computers . . .
These nouns are called countable nouns. In contrast, some nouns cannot be counted in this way:
* one advice, two advices, three advices . . .
* one furniture, two furnitures, three furnitures . . .
* one software, two softwares, three softwares . . .
These nouns are called uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns refer to things which are considered as indivisible wholes, and therefore cannot be counted.
Uncountable nouns have two important grammatical features:
1 They have a singular form (advice, furniture, software), but no
plural form (*advices, *furnitures, *softwares)
2 They do not take a or an before them (*an advice, *a furniture,
*a software)
Other uncountable nouns include: fun, information, health, honesty, luck,luggage, mud, music, traffic.
Genitive nouns
Genitive nouns denote possession:
John’s car = the car belonging to John
the baby’s toys = the toys belonging to the baby
The genitive (sometimes called genitive case) is formed:
1 By adding ’s (apostrophe s) to a singular noun:
the baby the baby’s toys
our son our son’s wife
the President the President’s office
2 If the noun already has an -s ending because it is plural, we add
the apostrophe alone to form the genitive:
the Farmers the Farmers’ Union
two doctors two doctors’ reports
3 With irregular plural nouns , the genitive is formed by
adding apostrophe s, just as in (1) above:
the children the children’s clothes
the men the men’s toiletries
the women the women’s group
the people the people’s decision
4 Nouns ending in -s, in which the -s does not denote a plural,
generally take an apostrophe alone:
Prince Charles Prince Charles’ children
Martin Nichols Martin Nichols’ house
However, apostrophe s is also sometimes added:
Prince Charles’s children.
Dependent and independent genitives
Genitives are either dependent or independent. A dependent genitive is followed by a noun:
the child’s toys
a student’s essay
Caroline’s friend
An independent genitive is not followed by a noun:
a friend of Caroline’s
a colleague of Frank’s
an old army pal of Jim’s
An independent genitive is often used in referring to relationships between people, as in these examples. Notice that this construction has a very specific meaning. The independent genitive a friend of Caroline’s does not mean the same as the dependent genitive Caroline’s friend:
Independent: We met a friend of Caroline’s in Spain.
Dependent: We met Caroline’s friend in Spain.
The independent genitive means ‘one of Caroline’s friends’, who may or may not be known to the hearer. In contrast, the dependent genitive means ‘one specific friend’, who is assumed to be known to the hearer.
Independent genitives are also used in references to places and businesses:
She stayed at Rebecca’s = Rebecca’s house
I ran into Jim in Sainsbury’s = Sainsbury’s supermarket
I left my wallet in the barber’s = the barber’s shop
The gender of nouns
The gender of nouns plays an important role in the grammar of somelanguages. In French, for instance, a masculine noun such as ciel (sky) requires the masculine form (le) of the definite article (le ciel = the sky). A feminine noun, such as mer (sea) requires the feminine form (la) of the definite article (la mer = the sea).
In English, however, nouns are not in themselves either masculine or feminine.They do not have grammatical gender, though they may refer to male or female people or animals:
The waiter was very efficient. The waitress was very efficient.
The tiger roars at night. The tigress roars at night.
These spelling differences (waiter/waitress, tiger/tigress) reflect distinctionsof sex, but they have no grammatical implications. We use the same definite article the whether we are referring to the waiter or the waitress, the tiger or the tigress.
Similarly, the natural distinctions reflected in such pairs as brother/sister, father/mother, and king/queen have no implications for grammar. While they refer to specific sexes, these words are not masculine or feminine in themselves.
However, gender is important in English when we replace a noun with a pronoun
The waiter was very efficient. ~He was very efficient.
The waitress was very efficient. ~She was very efficient.
Here, the choice of pronoun (he or she) is determined by the sex of the person being referred to. Gender differences are also seen in other pronoun pairs, including his/her and himself/herself.
Concrete Abstract
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
book anger
chair difficulty
dog eagerness
grass history
lake information
house progress
tree terror
Many nouns can be identified by their characteristic endings:
-ence absence, difference, evidence, experience
-ment embarrassment, experiment, government, treatment
-tion education, information, situation, vegetation
-ism defeatism, optimism, populism, symbolism
Singular and plural nouns
Most nouns have two forms, a singular form and a plural form. Regular nouns form the plural by adding -s to the singular:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
boy boys
table tables
However, some very frequent nouns have irregular plurals:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
man men
woman women
child children
foot feet
goose geese
mouse mice
tooth teeth
sheep sheep
The distinction between singular and plural is called number contrast.
Common and proper nouns
Proper nouns are the names of individual people and places, including geographical features such as roads, rivers, mountains and oceans:
Patrick Hong Kong
Nelson Mandela Euston Road
China Atlantic Ocean
Paris River Thames
New Delhi Mount Everest
The names of institutions, newspapers, buildings and ships are also proper nouns:
The Wall Street Journal London Underground
The Royal Albert Hall Titanic
Harvard University Mayflower
Millennium Dome
Finally, proper nouns include the days of the week, the months of the year and other periods of the calendar:
Monday Christmas
Tuesday Passover
January Ramadan
February Thanksgiving
Proper nouns are written with an initial capital (upper-case) letter. All other nouns are common nouns. Since proper nouns usually refer to unique individuals, places, or events in the calendar, they do not normally have a plural form. However, they may take a plural ending when numberis specifically being referred to:
There are two Patricks in my class.
Countable and uncountable nouns
Singular nouns denote just one instance, while plural nouns denote more than one instance:
Singular Plural
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
one boy two boys, three boys, four boys . . .
one day two days, three days, four days . . .
one computer two computers, three computers, four
computers . . .
These nouns are called countable nouns. In contrast, some nouns cannot be counted in this way:
* one advice, two advices, three advices . . .
* one furniture, two furnitures, three furnitures . . .
* one software, two softwares, three softwares . . .
These nouns are called uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns refer to things which are considered as indivisible wholes, and therefore cannot be counted.
Uncountable nouns have two important grammatical features:
1 They have a singular form (advice, furniture, software), but no
plural form (*advices, *furnitures, *softwares)
2 They do not take a or an before them (*an advice, *a furniture,
*a software)
Other uncountable nouns include: fun, information, health, honesty, luck,luggage, mud, music, traffic.
Genitive nouns
Genitive nouns denote possession:
John’s car = the car belonging to John
the baby’s toys = the toys belonging to the baby
The genitive (sometimes called genitive case) is formed:
1 By adding ’s (apostrophe s) to a singular noun:
the baby the baby’s toys
our son our son’s wife
the President the President’s office
2 If the noun already has an -s ending because it is plural, we add
the apostrophe alone to form the genitive:
the Farmers the Farmers’ Union
two doctors two doctors’ reports
3 With irregular plural nouns , the genitive is formed by
adding apostrophe s, just as in (1) above:
the children the children’s clothes
the men the men’s toiletries
the women the women’s group
the people the people’s decision
4 Nouns ending in -s, in which the -s does not denote a plural,
generally take an apostrophe alone:
Prince Charles Prince Charles’ children
Martin Nichols Martin Nichols’ house
However, apostrophe s is also sometimes added:
Prince Charles’s children.
Dependent and independent genitives
Genitives are either dependent or independent. A dependent genitive is followed by a noun:
the child’s toys
a student’s essay
Caroline’s friend
An independent genitive is not followed by a noun:
a friend of Caroline’s
a colleague of Frank’s
an old army pal of Jim’s
An independent genitive is often used in referring to relationships between people, as in these examples. Notice that this construction has a very specific meaning. The independent genitive a friend of Caroline’s does not mean the same as the dependent genitive Caroline’s friend:
Independent: We met a friend of Caroline’s in Spain.
Dependent: We met Caroline’s friend in Spain.
The independent genitive means ‘one of Caroline’s friends’, who may or may not be known to the hearer. In contrast, the dependent genitive means ‘one specific friend’, who is assumed to be known to the hearer.
Independent genitives are also used in references to places and businesses:
She stayed at Rebecca’s = Rebecca’s house
I ran into Jim in Sainsbury’s = Sainsbury’s supermarket
I left my wallet in the barber’s = the barber’s shop
The gender of nouns
The gender of nouns plays an important role in the grammar of somelanguages. In French, for instance, a masculine noun such as ciel (sky) requires the masculine form (le) of the definite article (le ciel = the sky). A feminine noun, such as mer (sea) requires the feminine form (la) of the definite article (la mer = the sea).
In English, however, nouns are not in themselves either masculine or feminine.They do not have grammatical gender, though they may refer to male or female people or animals:
The waiter was very efficient. The waitress was very efficient.
The tiger roars at night. The tigress roars at night.
These spelling differences (waiter/waitress, tiger/tigress) reflect distinctionsof sex, but they have no grammatical implications. We use the same definite article the whether we are referring to the waiter or the waitress, the tiger or the tigress.
Similarly, the natural distinctions reflected in such pairs as brother/sister, father/mother, and king/queen have no implications for grammar. While they refer to specific sexes, these words are not masculine or feminine in themselves.
However, gender is important in English when we replace a noun with a pronoun
The waiter was very efficient. ~He was very efficient.
The waitress was very efficient. ~She was very efficient.
Here, the choice of pronoun (he or she) is determined by the sex of the person being referred to. Gender differences are also seen in other pronoun pairs, including his/her and himself/herself.
