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The Inimitable Pair: Noun and Verb
The noun and the verb are the inimitable pair. Without them, sentences wouldn’t exist. You would never know who was doing what to whom. There would be no actors and no action. As a matter of fact, we’d essentially be reduced to adjectives and adverbs. I tried to come up with a series of adjectives and adverbs to explain that I wanted to buy a new dress. The effort gave me a headache and reduced me to grunts and groans of frustration. So, as a writer and editor, I have great appreciation for this inimitable pair!
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The Clarifying Noun
As a subject complement in a sentence, a noun completes the meaning of the subject. My mentor is an avid reader.
When a noun is an object complement, it describes or renames the object of the verb in the sentence. Heavy metal music makes me crazy.
Classifying The Noun
Nouns serve a lot of purposes, but they always name something.
- If a noun names a particular person, place, thing, or idea, it is called a proper noun and is capitalized. Proper nouns can be whole names like Dannye Williamsen. They can be titles of books like Second Chances. Therefore, proper nouns are not necessarily one word nouns.
- If the noun does not single out a particular person, place, thing, or idea, it is called a common noun, and it is not capitalized: book, policeman, writer.
- If a noun names a single object that is made up of members or more than one unit of some kind, it is called a collective noun. A collective noun is treated as singular even though it consists of more than one member or unit — family, jury, committee, audience.
We don’t hear about the following categories that often, but I wanted to include them here.
- Concrete nouns name tangible objects, such as door, car, foot. These are all objects that can be sensed through at least one of the five senses.
- Abstract nouns name emotions, qualities, or intangible ideas – all things that you cannot detect with your five senses: happiness, violence, bravery, love, consciousness.
Both abstract and concrete nouns can be either count or noncount nouns (see below).
- Count nouns and noncount nouns (sometimes called mass nouns) are another way of categorization. The key, obviously, is whether the object named by the noun can be counted or not.
So, if you can make the word plural or place a quantifier in front of it, such as thirty birds, then it is a count noun. If the noun has no plural form, then it is a noncount noun, such as furniture. There is no plural for furniture. Table is a piece of furniture, but it does have a plural form. Therefore, table is a count noun, but furniture is a noncount noun.
Examples of noncount nouns are abundant: homework, bread, clothing, rain, lumber. The count nouns related to these examples would be assignment, loaf, dress, rainstorm, board. You can have more than one of all the examples of count nouns. With the noncount nouns, there is no legitimate plural form. You can, however, add phrases to them to indicate quantity: tons of homework, loaves of bread.
- The last classification is animate versus inanimate nouns. This one is pretty easy: if the noun refers to something alive, it’s an animate noun; if not, it isn’t.
Now that we have generally identified the noun, which can show up in a sentence alone as a subject or an object or can be part of a phrase or clause, let’s take a look at its partner: THE VERB...
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