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English also uses no article before a mass noun or a plural noun if the reference is indefinite and not specifically identifiable in context. [4] For example: Generic mass noun: Happiness is contagious. Generic plural noun: Cars have accelerators. Generic plural noun: They want equal rights. Indefinite mass noun: I drink coffee.
An influential definition of noun incorporation (NI) by Sapir (1911) and Mithun (1984) has stated that NI is “a construction in which a noun and a verb stem combine to yield a complex verb.” [3] [4] Due to the wide variation in how noun incorporation presents itself in different languages, however, it is difficult to create an agreed upon ...
While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun. [4] Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English.
A bare noun is a noun that is used without a surface determiner or quantifier. [1] 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 ...
Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or counting quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article such as a or an (in languages that have such articles). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.
The grammar of Classical Nahuatl is agglutinative, head-marking, and makes extensive use of compounding, noun incorporation and derivation. That is, it can add many different prefixes and suffixes to a root until very long words are formed. Very long verbal forms or nouns created by incorporation, and accumulation of prefixes are common in ...
In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" are articles, which combine with nouns to form noun phrases. Articles typically specify the ...
Affixally polysynthetic languages do not use noun incorporation or verb serialisation, since this violates the rule concerning the number of roots allowable per word. Many make a weak distinction between nouns and verbs, which allows using affixes to translate these parts of speech.