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N

Noun

nouns are hard to define. You may have heard them described as ‘names’ (e.g.

Shân, Joanna, language, or cat), but they can also refer to abstract concepts such as

emptiness, joy, and age. However, many words more usually thought of as verbs, or

even as adverbs or adjectives, can be used as nouns, and it is its syntactic behaviour

which makes a word a noun rather than anything else. Nouns can usually be singular or

plural, they can be modified by adjectives and they can be preceded by determiners.

For example, in the sentence ‘Have you read a good book?’, a is a determiner, good is an

adjective, and book is a noun. Similarly, in the sentence ‘Did you have a good swim?’,

swim is a noun, although in a different sentence it could be used as a verb (‘I swim

every Monday’).

noun phrase

a grammatical unit built around a noun. For example, car, the car, and the

red car are all noun phrases. See page 64.