UNIVERSITY IN
NOUNS
SEMINAR WORK
Student:
Professor:
Name and surname, index nr.:
Sarajevo, January 2018.
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2. DEFINITION OF NOUNS
The word noun is derived from the Latin language and the word
nomen
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, which means
''name''. A noun is a word that functions as a name for a specific thing or set of things: living
creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence and ideas. In the Englosh
language, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and
they can function as the head of a noun phrase.
Nouns do not have the same categories in all languages, therefore a lot definitions are
language specific. Therefore, sometimes they are defined in terms of the grammatical
categories to which they are subjected, mostly classed by gender and inflected for case and
number.
They are frequently defined in terms of their meanings (semantic properties). They are
described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, idea
and so on. This sort of definion is often critized to be uninformative.
Linguists mostly prefer to define nouns in terms of their formal properties. The same applies
to other lexical categories, too. The formal properties of a lexical category include:
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Morphological informtion: prefixes or suffixes the words take;
The syntax: how do the words combine with other words and expressions of particular
types.
However, these kinds of definitions can still be specific for a certain language.
When it comes to gender, in some languages gender is assigned to nouns: masculine, feminine
and neuter. Besides that, there can be a number or a case applicable too. The gender of a
specific noun often entails agreement in other words that modify the noun or relate to it.
grammatical gender very often correlates with the form of the noun and the inflection pattern
it follows. Gender also correlates with the sex of the noun's referent, especially in the case of
denoting people. In the English language, nouns do not have a gender, but many of them
denote people (and sometimes animals) of a specific sex and pronouns that refer to these
nouns must take the appropriate gender for that noun.
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Lewis, C. T., Short, C., ''A Latin Dictionary'' dostupno na:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=nomen
, (posjećeno 5.1.2018.)
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Loos, E. E., (2003). ''Glossary of linguistic terms: What is a noun?'', dostupno na:
http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/noun
, (posjećeno 5.1.2018.)
