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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]
For example, the noun phrase kinesiology functions as a pre-head complement in the larger noun phrase a kinesiology student. The noun phrase's status a complement can be made clearer by paraphrasing the noun phrase that contains it: a student of kinesiology, in which of kinesiology is more clearly a complement. [46]
Some examples of noun phrases are underlined in the sentences below. The head noun appears in bold. This election-year's politics are annoying for many people. Almost every sentence contains at least one noun phrase. Those five beautiful shiny Arkansas Black apples is a noun phrase of which apples is the head.
Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. (Sometimes, the use of one or more additional words is optional.) Notable examples are cuisines, cheeses, cat breeds, dog breeds, and horse breeds. (See List of words derived from toponyms.)
The determinative function is typically obligatory in a singular, countable, common noun phrase (compare I have a new cat to *I have new cat). Semantically, determiners are usually definite or indefinite (e.g., the cat versus a cat), [4] and they often agree with the number of the head noun (e.g., a new cat but not *many new cat).
A grammatical distinction is often made between count (countable) nouns such as clock and city, and non-count (uncountable) nouns such as milk and decor. [5] Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This is a good wine. Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. [4]
A proper adjective/adverb (often called "modifiers") must modify a noun or verb (the "head"). For example, the creator of the language, Sonja Lang, uses the name jan Sonja. jan is a noun meaning "person", and it is modified by her first name. This can be extended to other proper nouns, such as ma Kanata "Canada", in which ma means place.
The following is a list of adjectival forms of cities in English and their demonymic equivalents, which denote the people or the inhabitants of these cities. Demonyms ending in -ese are the same in the singular and plural forms. The ending -man has feminine equivalent -woman (e.g. an Irishman and a Scotswoman).