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In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non-count nouns are distinguished from count nouns.
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions. English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural, both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos." respectively. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
In linguistics, a count noun is a noun that can be modified by a numeral and that occurs in both singular and plural forms, and that can co-occur with quantificational determiners like every, each, several, etc. A mass noun has none of these properties, because it cannot be modified by a numeral, cannot occur in plural, and cannot co-occur with quantificational determiners.
English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that, if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
The plural, in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one. Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word cats, which corresponds to the singular cat.
The modern Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifiers or measure words. One use of classifiers is when a noun is qualified by a numeral known as a noun phrase. When a phrase such as "one person" or "three books" is translated into Chinese, it is normally necessary to insert an appropriate classifier between the numeral and the noun. For example, in Standard Mandarin, the first of these phrases would be 一个人 yí gè rén, where yī means "one", rén means "person", and gè is the required classifier. There are also other grammatical contexts in which classifiers are used, including after the demonstratives 这 (這) zhè ("this") and 那 nà ("that"); however, when a noun stands alone without any such qualifier, no classifier is needed. There are also various other uses of classifiers: for example, when placed after a noun rather than before it, or when repeated, a classifier signifies a plural or indefinite quantity.
In Japanese, counter words or counters are measure words used with numbers to count things, actions, and events.
Quantity or amount is a property that can exist as a multitude or magnitude, which illustrate discontinuity and continuity. Quantities can be compared in terms of "more", "less", or "equal", or by assigning a numerical value multiple of a unit of measurement. Mass, time, distance, heat, and angle are among the familiar examples of quantitative properties.
In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging, also called grammatical tagging is the process of marking up a word in a text (corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition and its context. A simplified form of this is commonly taught to school-age children, in the identification of words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.
A plurale tantum is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular form is rarely used.
In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which native speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. It compares grammatical processes that are in frequent use to less frequently used ones that tend towards lexicalization. Generally the test of productivity concerns identifying which grammatical forms would be used in the coining of new words: these will tend to only be converted to other forms using productive processes.
A classifier is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an important role in certain languages, especially East Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Classifiers are absent or marginal in European languages. An example of a possible classifier in English is piece in phrases like "three pieces of paper".
In French, articles and determiners are required on almost every common noun, much more so than in English. They are inflected to agree in gender and number with the noun they determine, though most have only one plural form. Many also often change pronunciation when the word that follows them begins with a vowel sound.
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns.
Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word, in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particularly common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse. Examples include "readers of Wikipedia appreciate their encyclopedia," "the customerwho spends in this market."
Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax where the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme. Each unit may stand as an irreducible element and not be required to form a further "subtree." Due to its reduction to the smallest terminal possible, the terminals are smaller than morphemes. Therefore, morphemes and words cannot be itemised as a single terminal, and instead are composed by several terminals. As a result, Nanosyntax can serve as a solution to phenomena that are inadequately explained by other theories of syntax.
A bare noun is a noun that is used without a surface determiner or quantifier. In natural languages, the distribution of bare nouns is subject to various language-specific constraints. Under the DP hypothesis a noun in an argument position must have a determiner or quantifier that introduces the noun, warranting special treatment of the bare nouns that seemingly contradict this. As a result, bare nouns have attracted extensive study in the fields of both semantics and syntax.
References
- ↑ Pelletier, F. Jeffry: Non-singular reference: some preliminaries. In Philosophia Vol. 5 No. 4 Pp. 451–465, October 1975.
- ↑ Cheng, Lisa L.S., Doetjes, Jenny, and Sybesma, Rint: How universal is the Universal Grinder? In Linguistics in the Netherlands 2008, pp. 50–62.
- ↑ Bunt, Hendrik C. (1981). The formal semantics of mass terms (Thesis). Universiteit van Amsterdam. OCLC 251587734.
- 1 2 Zhang, Niina Ning (2013). Classifier Structures in Mandarin Chinese. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-030499-2.
- ↑ Filip, Hana (1999). Aspect, Eventuality Types, and Nominal Reference. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-8153-3271-8.
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