pre-final draft of
entry appearing in:
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, vol. 3, 2nd
edition,
ed. by William Frawley. 201. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. 2003.
Noun
Leonard
Talmy
Department of Linguistics Center for Cognitive Science
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Formally, a noun is a single word that can be basic (a root alone or with nonderivational affixes), derived (including derivational affixes), or compound (including two or more roots). Like verbs and adjectives, nouns can constitute an open class. Though disputed, it does appear that all languages have the category "noun"; what they may lack is (many) basic nouns or roots with exclusively nominal function. Nouns are the heads of noun phrases, typically in construction with articles, demonstratives, numerals, classifiers, adjectives, adjuncts, and relative clauses. Semantically, a noun prototypically refers to a physical object or mass; other types of referents (e.g., actions, abstract ideas) are subject to a conceptual reification toward these prototypes (e.g., the reified actions in: John gave me a call / some help.). Generally, languages grammatically subcategorize nouns along certain semantic parameters, principally: proper/common, count/mass, unitary/collective, relative/absolute, alienability, animacy, gender, class, classifier category. Additionally, certain noninherent semantic parameters are recurrently specified in association with nouns, principally: number, distributivity, definiteness, specificity, genericness, quantification, modification; case marks the semantic or syntactic function of a noun (phrase) relative to another constituent or the rest of the sentence. Generally, certain basic semantic increments appear in deriving nouns -- e.g., from verb stems: the process, performer, instrument, place, or product of the verb’s action.
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