Nouns The general term ‘noun’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties: (a) It contains amongst its most central members those words that denote persons or concrete objects. (b) Its members head phrases – noun phrases – which characteristically function as subject or object in clause structure and refer to the participants in the situation described in the clause, to the actor, patient, recipient, and so on. (c) It is the class to which the categories of number, gender and case have their primary application in languages which have these grammatical categories. The ‘primary’ application of these categories is to be distinguished from their ‘secondary’ application, as when they are attributable to a rule of agreement. Number in English, for example, applies both to nouns and (in combination with person) to verbs, so that we may contrast, say, The dog bites and The dogs bite . But it applies here primarily to dog and secondarily to bite because the verb takes its (person–) number property from the subject – and the reason we put it this way rather than the other way round is that the semantic distinction is a matter of how many dogs are involved, not how many acts of biting.
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