Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Nouns

Today's topic: the fearsome NOUN. If you haven't yet noticed, I'm an extremely dramatic person, I like to rank things up a few notches and even the simplest things-such as nouns, are not eliminated. We learn when we're young, a noun is a person, place, or thing. Which is the simplest and fastest way to explain a noun, but it's time to go into more depth.

The dictionary.com definition of noun is: any member of a class of words that can function as the main or only elements of subjects of verbs (A dog just barked), or of objects of verbs or prepositions (to send money from home), and that in English can take plural forms and possessive endings (Three of his buddies want to borrow John's laptop). Nouns are often described as referring to persons, places, things, states, or qualities, and the word noun is itself often used as an attributive modifier, as in noun compound; noun group.

Don't really know how to break that down, seems quite clear with examples and everything. Here we can only move forward, which is where we split common nouns from proper nouns. Proper Nouns are usually considered the nouns which have a capital letter (person or place). Proper Noun Examples:

  • McDonalds
  • Samantha
  • Devin
  • Mexico
  • Paris
Common Nouns are the words which don't begin with a capital letter:
  • dog
  • sheep
  • box
  • kid
  • boy
  • girl
  • book

We then have to discuss the pluralization of nouns. There are several forms of plural nouns, the most common are the adding of -s, -es, or none at all, to the end of nouns. Not one cup but two cups, box to boxes, fish to fish. Other examples: child to children, goose to geese, person to people. After all, no one can be more than one person. ;)

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