PARTS OF SPEECH

Mrs. Leidelen M. Telegrapo

Instructor in English Plus
NOUNS
The term noun comes from the Latin
word nomen (name) and that the
traditional definition of a noun is that
it is the name of a person, a place, a
thing, an abstract quality or a
collective group.
They denote either whole classes of
physical objects such as cats,
people, tables, clouds, houses,
trees, fish, atoms, stars and so on or
particular individual objects.
CLASSES OF NOUNS
1. Proper Nouns. A proper noun is a word
or sequence of several words
identifying some particular individual
person, place, event or thing. A proper
name can stand on its own as a noun
phrase. Typically, English proper
names are spelled beginning with
capital letters
Examples: John, Henry, Helsinki, Hurfurd,
Rover, Dublin, New York, San
Francisco, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Watergate, Waterloo, Mars, Alpha,
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet (the play)
2. Common Nouns. A common noun is a
type of noun which can be used to refer
to member of classes of people, things
or masses of stuff. The same common
noun used in different context can pick
out different individual people or things.
As the name suggests, common nouns
are the most common type of noun.
Typically, English common nouns are
not spelled with an initial capital letter.

Examples: apple, desks, elephant, girls,
hatred, intersexuality, phenomenon, sky,
soil, town, mall, weather
3. Mass Nouns. Mass nouns refer to stuff
or unsegmented material dealt. They
denote the following:
Intangible things like gases, such as air,
oxygen, etc.
Material things that are not countable,
such as liquids, e. g. water, oil, milk,
wine and ink
Material things with particles too small
to be counted like dust, dirt, salt and
rice
Aggregates or sets that are thought of
as one unit, like luggage, furniture,
jewelry, equipment and machinery

4. Count Nouns. A count noun is a type of
common noun which can be used to
refer to an individual object or to the
objects in a countable collection rather
than to a mass of indivisible stuff.

Examples: apple, barn, envelope, mountain,
principle

Count nouns have both singular and plural
forms, so lamp is a count noun as it has
a plural form lamps. In English, the
quantifiers many and few occur
modifying count nouns, but not mass
nouns.
5. Collective Nouns. Collective nouns refer
to a number of people or group of similar
objects who come together and taken as
a single unit.
Examples: audience, board, club,
committee, congregation, council, crew,
crowd, faculty, gang, government, group,
jury, parliament, party, team
We also have:
flock (of birds, sheep)
herd ( of cattle, deer, elephants)
pack ( of wolves, jackals)
school (of fish)
swarm (of flying insects)

6. Abstract Nouns. Abstract nouns are
nouns that typically refer to abstraction,
such as activities, emotion, virtues,
vices, force, ideologies, religions,
attitude, times, distances, and
professions. Generally, the things
referred to by abstract nouns are ones
that we can sensibly talk about, so they
do exist in some sense, but cannot
experience them directly with our
senses.
Examples: courage, envy, intelligence,
bigotry, war, love, fear, gravity,
communism, emotion, force, optimism,
inertia, philanthropy, month, mile,
patience, faith, dependence, humility
7. Concrete Nouns. In contrast to
abstract nouns, concrete nouns
have physical forms; they can be
seen, touched, smelled, tasted or
heard. They occupy space.

Examples: books, computers,
cassette player, car, aquarium,
decorations, doll, fan