In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.
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In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.
Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.
In traditional English grammar, the noun is one of the eight parts of speech.
History
The word comes from the Latin nomen meaning "name". Word classes like nouns were first described by the Sanskrit grammarian IAST: Pāṇini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax, and were defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns inflect for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative.
Different definitions of nouns
Expressions of natural language have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they take and what kinds of other expressions they combine with; but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of a noun at the outset of this page is thus a formal, traditional grammatical definition. That definition, for the most part, is considered uncontroversial and furnishes the means for users of certain languages to effectively distinguish most nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns as words that are modified by definite articles. There have also been several attempts to define nouns in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are discussed below. thumb|right|250px|Rodin's The Thinker. Should we refer to this with a verb ("think", "ponder") or a noun ("thought", "thinker"), or an adjective ("pensive", "thoughtful")? In different contexts, any of these would do. This illustrates the problem with defining lexical categories in terms of what they refer to.
Names for things
The existence of such general nouns demonstrates that nouns refer to entities that are organized in taxonomic hierarchies. But other kinds of expressions are also organized into such structured taxonomic relationships. For example the verbs "stroll","saunter", "stride", and "tread" are more specific words than the more general "walk". Moreover, "walk" is more specific than the verb "move", which, in turn, is less general than "change". But it is unlikely that such taxonomic relationships can be used to define nouns and verbs. We cannot define verbs as those words that refer to "changes" or "states", for example, because the nouns change and state probably refer to such things, but, of course, aren't verbs. Similarly, nouns like "invasion", "meeting", or "collapse" refer to things that are "done" or "happen". In fact, an influential theory has it that verbs like "kill" or "die" refer to events, one of the categories of things that nouns are supposed to refer to.
