Linguistics - Syntactic analysis - Nouns and Determiners

Nouns and Determiners

 How can we characterize Nouns?

 Nouns can be characterized using a notional definition, i.e. a description which offers a characterization of a word class in terms of concepts of meaning. Nouns are defined as words that denote people, animals, things, places, abstract ideas or concepts, emotional states, and bodily sensations. Another approach is to characterize nouns using formal and distributional criteria. Under this view, we look at the shape that words can take, at where they can occur in sentences, and at the way they behave and function in sentential patterns.

 Morphological evidence: By looking at the morphological make-up of words, we can tell which word class they belong to.

Derivational evidence: There are derivational affixes which are typically taken by nouns: -hood, -tion, -ness, -ance, -ship. For example: brotherhood, devotion, happiness, friendship, allowance.

 So, if a word can be shown to take any of the above affixes (in addition to others), it is identified as a noun and it is assigned to the word class Noun.

 Inflectional evidence: There are inflectional affixes which are typically taken by nouns: plural ending -s (e.g. one car/two cars) and the genitive ending ‘s (e.g. I met a man; the man’s car was black).

 Although morphological criteria are useful, they are of limited value. For example, many nouns do not take any of the typical nominal suffixes (e.g. wall, finger, snow); some nouns take an irregular plural ending (e.g. child/children, mouse/mice). This means that morphological criteria are insufficient. We need to use distributional criteria, which are the most reliable.

 Distributional criteria consist in using the syntactic patterns in which a word occurs to determine its syntactic category, i.e. the word class to which it belongs. In other words, defining a word class is done by characterizing the environments that the members of that class typically occur in.

 First, Nouns are preceded by determiners. Determiners form a small class of words which specify more precisely the meaning of the nouns they precede. The most common determiners in English include the definite article the (the reason), the indefinite article a/an (a field, an argument), the demonstratives this/that, these/those  (this decision, those boxes), the possessives my, your, our, his, her, its, their (our address, her coat, its tail, their performance), which (which car) and whose (whose car).

 

Second, nouns can also be preceded by adjectives, i.e. the class of words that somehow qualify the nouns they precede. They are typically understood as referring to properties: e.g. in beautiful dreams, beautiful is an adjective modifying dreams.

Classification of nouns

 Nouns not only represent entities like people, places, things, but also denote abstract and intangible concepts such as happiness, information, hope, and so forth. Nouns fall in three major categories: common nouns, pronouns and  proper nouns. A common noun is a noun that refers to a class of objects or concepts, such as chair, cat, anger. Some of these refer to things that can be counted while others refer to things that cannot be counted. In other words, they are either countable (e.g. a chair/chairs

) or uncountable (e.g. furniture/*furnitures).

 Proper nouns denote specific people or places and are typically uncountable. Proper nouns are examples of what are called Referring Expressions. This is because when they are uttered in a particular context, they uniquely refer to specific individuals, places or objects in the world of discourse, such as John, London, Barbie.

Common nouns and proper nouns display clear contrasts in terms of the combinatory possibilities with determiners, as shown in the following table:

Combinatory possibilities with Determiners:

Countable nouns have singular and plural forms, whereas uncountable nouns occur only with some or the.

Some common nouns may either uncountable or countable, depends on the kind of reference they have. Example, the word cake can be countable when it refers to a specific one as in I made a biscuit, but it can be uncountable when it refers to biscuit in general as in I like biscuit.

 

 Since proper nouns refer to something or someone unique, they do not normally take a plural form and cannot occur with a determiner (e.g. *a John, *two Johns, *a January, *three Januaries).

 However, proper nouns can converted into countable nouns when they refer to a type of individual or particular individual.

 

(1)    There are three Davids in my class.

(2)    It’s nothing like the America I remember.

(3)    My brother is an Einstein at maths.

 

 Pronouns form the third major category of nouns.  The class of pronouns includes: personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they), possessive pronouns (mine, yours, hers, his, its, ours, theirs), reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself herself, himself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves), demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, those), reciprocal pronouns (each other, one another), relative pronouns (who, whom whose, which), interrogative pronouns (who?, what?), indefinite pronouns (someone, something, anything, anybody, everybody, nobody, anywhere, etc.), ‘weather’ it, existential ‘there’.

 

 Two main points can be made about pronouns. First, they neither take a determiner nor combine with an adjective (e.g. *The she came early.)

 Second, pronouns substitute for whole NPs, so strictly speaking pronouns are pro-NPs.  For example, in the following sentence, the pronoun ‘he’ stands for the Noun Phrase ‘the Kenyan athlete’ not for the noun ‘athlete’; similarly, the pronoun ‘it’ substitutes for the Noun Phrase ‘the Boston marathon’ not for the noun ‘marathon’.

 

(4)   The Kenyan athlete won the Boston marathon. He won it last year too.

 

 Numerals (cardinal or ordinal) are not typical nouns, like common nouns, but they may be considered a subclass of nouns on the basis of the fact they can take plural endings in certain, admittedly restricted, circumstances. (e.g. The group divided into twos and threes.) Ordinals can take a preceding determiner (e.g. I bet on the third.)

 

Noun Phrase

A phrase is an element of clause structure typically (but not always) containing more than one word but lacking the Subject-Predicate structure usually found in a clause.

Noun Phrases are phrases whose central element is a noun. The central element in a phrase is its Head: the phrase is named after its head word, which is the minimal form of the phrase. Let us consider the following sentences.

(5)   The ties are expensive.

(6)   The red ties are expensive.

(7)   The red ties that you bought are expensive.

(8)   Ties are expensive.

(9)   They are expensive.

 

The underlined phrases have different lengths despite the fact that they are all noun phrases since their central element is a noun. As the example in (8) shows, a noun phrase can consist solely of a head or even of a pronoun, as in (9).