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Every noun form belongs to a number class (they are partitioned into disjoint classes by number). Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs may also have different forms for each number subclass and inflect to match the number of the nouns they modify or agree with (number is an agreement category).
A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
Plural number is often said to mean more than one, [24] but, in fact, it restricts the denotation of the noun to the set of non-singularities. That is, in English, plural nouns are appropriate for quantities denoted by all the real numbers , including 0 and other quantities smaller than 1, except exactly ±1.
Additionally, there are polyplural noun classes. A polyplural noun class is a plural class for more than one singular class. [4] For example, Proto-Bantu class 10 contains plurals of class 9 nouns and class 11 nouns, while class 6 contains plurals of class 5 nouns and class 15 nouns. Classes 6 and 10 are inherited as polyplural classes by most ...
For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) "foot") changing to ...
Nouns are not reduplicated for plural form when used with classifiers, definite or indefinite, although Mary Dalrymple and Suriel Mofu give counterexamples where reduplication and classifiers co-occur. [24] In informal language, classifiers can be used with numbers alone without the nouns if the context is well known.
For example, a noun or noun phrase cannot be both singular and plural, since these are both values of the "number" category. It can, however, be both plural and feminine, since these represent different categories (number and gender). Categories may be described and named with regard to the type of meanings that they are
Some theories consider "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assign all numbers (including ordinal numbers like "first") to a part of speech called "numerals". [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Numerals in the broad sense can also be analyzed as a noun ("three is a small number"), as a pronoun ("the two went to town"), or for a small number of words as an ...