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The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts.The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns.
The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.
Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (shrinkage), -hood (sisterhood), and so on, [3] though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix (cat, grass, France). Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned ...
Many dictionaries do not point out such differences. Canadian and Australian usage is mixed, although Commonwealth writers generally hyphenate compounds of the form noun plus phrase (such as editor-in-chief). [12] Commander-in-chief prevails in all forms of English. Compound verbs in British English are hyphenated more often than in American ...
Classical Nahuatl grammar distinguished a non-possessed form in nouns (suffixed with -tl or -in) and a possessed form (without a suffix but bearing a prefix marking the possessor). The possessed form is comparable to Afro-Asiatic construct state. An example would be cihuātl ("woman, wife") vs. nocihuāuh ("my wife", prefix no-"my").
The reference form (more technically, the least marked) of certain parts of speech is normally in the nominative case, but that is often not a complete specification of the reference form, as the number and the gender may need to be specified. Thus, the reference or least marked form of an adjective might be the nominative masculine singular.
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".