CLASSIFICATION

OF NOUNS
Nouns not only represent entities like people, places, or
things, but also denote abstract and intangible concepts
such as happiness, information, hope, and so forth.

Such diversity of reference renders it

difficult to classify nouns solely according
to their meanings.

The following chart shows the canonical classification of

nouns taking into account semantic differences, but also
considering their formal and grammatical properties.
 TYPES OF NOUNS IN ENGLISH
Countable Desk, book, difficulty, remark, etc.
COMMON
NOUN Butter, gold, music, furniture, laziness,
Uncountable
etc.
Seoul, Kyung Hee, Stanford, Palo
PROPER NOUN Alto, January, etc.
Personal He, himself, his, etc.
Relative That, which, what, who, whom, etc.
Interrogative Who, where, how, why, when, etc.
PRONOUN

Anybody, everybody, somebody,

Indefinite
nobody, anywhere, etc.
As shown here, noun fall into three major
categories: common nouns, proper
nouns, and pronouns.

One important aspect of common nouns

is that they are either count or non-count.

Whether a noun is countable or not does not fully

depend on its reference; examples like difficulty which
is mass (non-nount) but difficulties which is count
suggest how subtle the distinction can be, and we have
nouns like furniture/*furnitures which are only mass and
chair/chairs which are only count.
Proper nouns denote specific people or places and
are typically uncountable. Common nouns and proper
nouns display clear contrasts in terms of the
combinatorial possibilites with determiners as show in
the following chart.
COMBINATION POSSIBILITIES WITH
DETERMINERS

Common N
Proper N
Countable uncountable neutral

Einstein
No Det *book music cake
*the Einstein
The + N The book the music the cake
*an Einstein
A+N A book *a music a cake
*some
Some + N *some book some music some cake
Einstein
N+s Books *musics cakes
*Einstein
 Proper nouns do not combine with any
determiner, as can be seen from the chart.

Meanwhile, count nouns have singular and plural

forms (a book and books), where as uncountable
nouns combine only with some or the. As noted
in Chapter 1, some common nouns may be either
count or non-count, depending on the kind of
reference they have.

For example, cake can be countable when it refers

to a specific one as in I made a cake, but can be
noncountable when it refers to ‘cake in general’ as
in I like cake.
Together with verbs, nouns are of pivotal
importance in English, forming the semantic
and structural components of sentences. This
chapter deals with the structural, semantic,
and functional dimensions of NPs, with focus
on the agreement relationships of nouns with
determiners and of noun phrases with verbs.