Nouns

Definition  A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea. Whatever exists, we assume, can be named, and that
name is a noun. A proper noun, which names a specific person, place, or thing (Carlos, Queen Marguerite, Middle East,
Jerusalem, Malaysia, Presbyterianism, God, Spanish, Buddhism, the Republican Party), is almost always capitalized. A
proper noun used as an addressed person's name is called a noun of address. Common nouns name everything else,
things that usually are not capitalized.

A group of related words can act as a single noun-like entity within a sentence. A Noun Clause contains a subject and
verb and can do anything that a noun can do:

What he does for this town is a blessing.

A Noun Phrase, frequently a noun accompanied by modifiers, is a group of related words acting as a noun: the oil
depletion allowance; the abnormal, hideously enlarged nose.

There is a separate section on word combinations that become Compound Nouns — such as daughter-in-law, half-
moon, and stick-in-the-mud.

Categories of Nouns

Click on "Noun School" to read and hear Lynn Ahren's "A Noun is a Person Place or Thing" (from Scholastic Rock, 1973).
Schoolhouse Rock® and its characters and other elements are trademarks and service marks of American Broadcasting
Companies, Inc. Used with permission.
Nouns can be classified further as count nouns, which name anything that can be counted (four books, two continents, a
few dishes, a dozen buildings); mass nouns (or non-count nouns), which name something that can't be counted (water,
air, energy, blood); and collective nouns, which can take a singular form but are composed of more than one individual
person or items (jury, team, class, committee, herd). We should note that some words can be either a count noun or a
non-count noun depending on how they're being used in a sentence:
 He got into trouble. (non-count)
 He had many troubles. (countable)
 Experience (non-count) is the best teacher.
 We had many exciting experiences (countable) in college.

Whether these words are count or non-count will determine whether they can be used with articles and determiners or
not. (We would not write "He got into the troubles," but we could write about "The troubles of Ireland."

Some texts will include the category of abstract nouns, by which we mean the kind of word that is not tangible, such as
warmth, justice, grief, and peace. Abstract nouns are sometimes troublesome for non-native writers because they can
appear with determiners or without: "Peace settled over the countryside." "The skirmish disrupted the peace that had
settled over the countryside." See the section on Plurals for additional help with collective nouns, words that can be
singular or plural, depending on context.
Forms of Nouns
Nouns can be in the subjective, possessive, and objective case. The word case defines the role of the noun in the
sentence. Is it a subject, an object, or does it show possession?
 The English professor [subject] is tall.
 He chose the English professor [object].
 The English professor's [possessive] car is green.

Nouns in the subject and object role are identical in form; nouns that show the possessive, however, take a different
form. Usually an apostrophe is added followed by the letter s (except for plurals, which take the plural "-s" ending first,
and then add the apostrophe). See the section on Possessives for help with possessive forms. There is also a table
outlining the cases of nouns and pronouns.

Almost all nouns change form when they become plural, usually with the simple addition of an -s or -es. Unfortunately,
it's not always that easy, and a separate section on Plurals offers advice on the formation of plural noun forms.

Assaying for Nouns*

Back in the gold rush days, every little town in the American Old West had an assayer's office, a place where wild-eyed
prospectors could take their bags of ore for official testing, to make sure the shiny stuff they'd found was the real thing,
not "fool's gold." We offer here some assay tests for nouns. There are two kinds of tests: formal and functional — what a
word looks like (the endings it takes) and how a word behaves in a sentence.
 Verbs
Definitions  Verbs carry the idea of being or action in the sentence.
 I am a student.
 The students passed all their courses.

As we will see on this page, verbs are classified in many ways. First, some verbs require an object to complete their
meaning: "She gave _____ ?" Gave what? She gave money to the church. These verbs are called transitive. Verbs that
are intransitive do not require objects: "The building collapsed." In English, you cannot tell the difference between a
transitive and intransitive verb by its form; you have to see how the verb is functioning within the sentence. In fact, a
verb can be both transitive and intransitive: "The monster collapsed the building by sitting on it."

Although you will seldom hear the term, a ditransitive verb — such as cause or give — is one that can take a direct
object and an indirect object at the same time: "That horrid music gave me a headache." Ditransitive verbs are slightly
different, then, from factitive verbs (see below), in that the latter take two objects.

Verbs are also classified as either finite or non-finite. A finite verb makes an assertion or expresses a state of being and
can stand by itself as the main verb of a sentence.
 The truck demolished the restaurant.
 The leaves were yellow and sickly.

Non-finite verbs (think "unfinished") cannot, by themselves, be main verbs:

 The broken window . . .
 The wheezing gentleman . . .

Another, more useful term for non-finite verb is verbal. In this section, we discuss various verbal forms: infinitives,
gerunds, and participles.

Four Verb Forms

The inflections (endings) of English verb forms are not difficult to remember. There are only four basic forms. Instead of
forming complex tense forms with endings, English uses auxiliary verb forms. English does not even have a proper
ending for future forms; instead, we use auxiliaries such as "I am going to read this afternoon." or "I will read." or even "I
am reading this book tomorrow." It would be useful, however, to learn these four basic forms of verb construction.

Name of verb Base form Past form Present participle Past participle

I can work.
to work I worked. I am working. I have worked.
I work.

I can write.
to write I wrote. I am writing. I have written.
I write.

Linking Verbs
A linking verb connects a subject and its complement. Sometimes called copulas, linking verbs are often forms of the
verb to be, but are sometimes verbs related to the five senses (look, sound, smell, feel, taste) and sometimes verbs that
somehow reflect a state of being (appear, seem, become, grow, turn, prove, remain). What follows the linking verb will
be either a noun complement or an adjective complement:
 Those people are all professors.
 Those professors are brilliant.
 This room smells bad.
 I feel great.
 A victory today seems unlikely.

A handful of verbs that reflect a change in state of being are sometimes called resulting copulas. They, too, link a subject
to a predicate adjective:
 His face turned purple.
 She became older.
 The dogs ran wild.
 The milk has gone sour.
 The crowd grew ugly.
 Adverbs
Definition  Adverbs are words that modify
 a verb (He drove slowly. — How did he drive?)
 an adjective (He drove a very fast car. — How fast was his car?)
 another adverb (She moved quite slowly down the aisle. — How slowly did she move?)

As we will see, adverbs often tell when, where, why, or under what conditions something happens or happened.
Adverbs frequently end in -ly; however, many words and phrases not ending in -ly serve an adverbial function and an -ly
ending is not a guarantee that a word is an adverb. The words lovely, lonely, motherly, friendly, neighborly, for instance,
are adjectives:
 That lovely woman lives in a friendly neighborhood.

If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb (modifying the verb of a sentence), it is called an
Adverb Clause:
 When this class is over, we're going to the movies.

When a group of words not containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb, it is called an adverbial phrase.
Prepositional phrases frequently have adverbial functions (telling place and time, modifying the verb):
 He went to the movies.
 She works on holidays.
 They lived in Canada during the war.

And Infinitive phrases can act as adverbs (usually telling why):

 She hurried to the mainland to see her brother.
 The senator ran to catch the bus.

But there are other kinds of adverbial phrases:

 He calls his mother as often as possible.

Adverbs can modify adjectives, but an adjective cannot modify an adverb. Thus we would say that "the students showed
a really wonderful attitude" and that "the students showed a wonderfully casual attitude" and that "my professor is
really tall, but not "He ran real fast."

Like adjectives, adverbs can have comparative and superlative forms to show degree.
 Walk faster if you want to keep up with me.
 The student who reads fastest will finish first.

We often use more and most, less and least to show degree with adverbs:
 With sneakers on, she could move more quickly among the patients.
 The flowers were the most beautifully arranged creations I've ever seen.
 She worked less confidently after her accident.
 That was the least skillfully done performance I've seen in years.
The as — as construction can be used to create adverbs that express sameness or equality: "He can't run as fast as his
sister."

A handful of adverbs have two forms, one that ends in -ly and one that doesn't. In certain cases, the two forms have
different meanings:
 He arrived late.
 Lately, he couldn't seem to be on time for anything.

In most cases, however, the form without the -ly ending should be reserved for casual situations:
 She certainly drives slow in that old Buick of hers.
 He did wrong by her.
 He spoke sharp, quick, and to the point.

Adverbs often function as intensifiers, conveying a greater or lesser emphasis to something. Intensifiers are said to have
three different functions: they can emphasize, amplify, or downtone. Here are some examples:

 Emphasizers:
o I really don't believe him.
o He literally wrecked his mother's car.
o She simply ignored me.
o They're going to be late, for sure.
 Amplifiers:
o The teacher completely rejected her proposal.
o I absolutely refuse to attend any more faculty meetings.
o They heartily endorsed the new restaurant.
o I so wanted to go with them.
o We know this city well.
 Downtoners:
o I kind of like this college.
o Joe sort of felt betrayed by his sister.
o His mother mildly disapproved his actions.
o We can improve on this to some extent.
o The boss almost quit after that.
o The school was all but ruined by the storm.

Adverbs (as well as adjectives) in their various degrees can be accompanied by premodifiers:
 She runs very fast.
 We're going to run out of material all the faster
 Adjectives
Definition  Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. The Articles — a, an,
and the — are adjectives.
 the tall professor
 the lugubrious lieutenant
 a solid commitment
 a month's pay
 a six-year-old child
 the unhappiest, richest man

If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adjective, it is called an Adjective Clause. My sister, who is
much older than I am, is an engineer. If an adjective clause is stripped of its subject and verb, the resulting modifier
becomes an Adjective Phrase: He is the man who is keeping my family in the poorhouse.

Position of Adjectives
Unlike Adverbs, which often seem capable of popping up almost anywhere in a sentence, adjectives nearly always
appear immediately before the noun or noun phrase that they modify. Sometimes they appear in a string of adjectives,
and when they do, they appear in a set order according to category. (See Below.) When indefinite pronouns — such as
something, someone, anybody — are modified by an adjective, the adjective comes after the pronoun:

Anyone capable of doing something horrible to someone nice should be punished.

Something wicked this way comes.
And there are certain adjectives that, in combination with certain words, are always "postpositive" (coming after the
thing they modify):

The president elect, heir apparent to the Glitzy fortune, lives in New York proper.
See, also, the note on a- adjectives, below, for the position of such words as "ablaze, aloof, aghast."

Degrees of Adjectives
Adjectives can express degrees of modification:
Gladys is a rich woman, but Josie is richer than Gladys, and Sadie is the richest woman in town.
The degrees of comparison are known as:
 Positive
 Comparative
 Superlative
Positive Comparative Superlative
rich richer richest
lovely lovelier loveliest
beautiful more beautiful most beautiful