We can identify nouns based on their inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and syntactic distribution.

In terms of inflectional morphology, nouns may inflect for person, number, gender, and/or case. In English, nouns inflect for number, with singular and plural forms. English pronouns also have person and gender distinctions, in addition to number.

There are many different kinds of derivational morphemes that modify nouns. Some examples of derivational morphemes in English are shown below in Table 1.

(adapted from Carnie 2021: 47)

In terms of syntactic distribution, noun phrases typically show up in argument positions, both the arguments of verbs and the arguments of prepositions, as shown in (1).

(1) a. The apple is red. subject

b. I ate the apple. direct object

c. I gave the apple a shine. indirect object

d. There was a worm in the apple. object of preposition

Nouns can be modified by determiners and adjectives, and so their syntactic position can often be described with reference to determiners and adjectives. In English, nouns can appear after either determiners or adjectives, or appear on their own, as shown in (2).

(2) a. I ate the apple. after a determiner
b. I ate the red apple. after an adjective
c. I ate apples. on its own

Inflectional values on nouns

The most common kinds of inflection found on nouns include case, person, number, and gender. The latter three of these (person, number, and gender) tend to have close interactions and the group is often referred to as φ-features, named after the Greek letter phi. In the next chapter, we will go through these categories in more depth. For now, we will just go through a brief overview.

Case

Case is used to mark the role a noun phrase plays in a sentence. Some languages do not mark case at all, some mark case on on only some nouns, some mark case on all nouns, and some mark case on determiners. In English, we have case distinctions only on pronouns, as shown in (3). When the first person pronoun is in subject position, it appears as I, as in (3a), but as me in object position in (3b). Likewise, the third person plural pronoun appears as they in subject position in (3b) and them in object position in (3a).

(3) a. I saw them.

b. They saw me.

Person

Nouns in most languages are categorized as first, second, or third person. First person nouns refer to the person speaking or signing. Second person nouns refer to the person being addressed. Third person nouns are everyone and everything else.

Number

Number indicates how many instances of the noun there are. In English, we have two number categories: singular and plural, although singular is unmarked. In languages like English which have both a singular and plural, the singular means that there is exactly one while the plural means that there is more than one. The plural marker in English is-s, although there are also a number of nouns which take irregular plurals, such as children, feet, and cacti.

(4) a. cat singular

b. cat-s plural

Gender

In grammar, gender refers to noun classes. In languages with extensive gender systems, all nouns belong to a noun class which is part of the lexical entry of that noun.

Derived nouns

There are some derivational morphemes that are common on nouns cross-linguistically, which are summarized in Table 6. But there are also many, many possible derivational meanings that might only show up in a single language. Some derivational morphemes change the part of speech of their stem (as in Table 7 and Table 8, which list derivational morphemes that change verbs and adjectives into nouns), whereas others keep the same part of speech (as in Table 9).

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References and further resources

For students

Carnie

Haspelmath, Martin and Andrea Sims. 2010. Understanding Morphology. London: Hodder Education.