Languages & Linguistics
Noun
A noun is a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea. In a sentence, nouns can function as the subject, object, or complement. They can be singular or plural and are often accompanied by articles or adjectives. Nouns are essential building blocks of language and play a crucial role in conveying meaning and structure in communication.
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6 Key excerpts on "Noun"
eBook - PDF- Robert Freidin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
This difference raises the question of the relation between the nonconcrete Noun language and the countable Noun language. The plural count Noun languages directs our attention to how one language differs from the next, rather than what different languages might share in common. The nonconcrete and noncount Noun language instead focuses on the properties that all languages share. However we spell this out, it remains a simple fact that every person possesses a capacity for language that allows them to acquire a language. So one way to begin answering the fundamental question is to give a precise characterization of what a language is. 3.2 What a language is: the lexicon For a precise characterization, let us start with an example of what we call the English language: the title of Princeton University’s introductory linguistics course (and the title of this chapter). The five words of the title belong to the vocabulary of English, what in linguistics is called a lexicon – in this case the English lexicon. Each word has a phonetic form, a phonetic label that specifies its pronunciation, which can be represented in writing as a sequence of letters in the English alphabet. Each word also has a semantic interpretation that constitutes its meaning. The pronunciations of the five words in the title are relatively straightforward, as are the semantic interpretations of the Noun introduction, the preposition to, and the conjunction and. The semantic inter- pretations of the Nouns language and linguistics are more complicated, as discussed above. So a precise characterization of a language must involve the specification of a lexicon. 3.2.1 The mental lexicon Given that a language is something that virtually every human acquires and that a lexicon is one essential part of the specification of a language, the lexicon must exist in the mind of the speaker – as a form of information that constitutes in part the speaker’s knowledge of the language.
- N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Jack Sidnell(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
For instance: (8) ‘girl’ ‘slave’ (FEMININE) (MASCULINE) Singular number, nominative case (S and A functions) puell-a serv-us Singular number, accusative case (O function) puell-am serv-um For Latin, the word class “Noun” is defined as “those words which inflect for number and case.” English is rather different. Countable Nouns can take plural marking (cat-s) but other Nouns cannot (there is no plural of mud). A different criterion is used here: “any word which should – in non-plural form – be preceded by an article or a possessor (the cat/mud, my cat/mud) is taken to be a Noun.” Similarly for verbs, varying criteria apply in different languages. There is also the question of function. A Noun can always be head of NP, which fills an argument slot in clause structure; a verb can always be head of a predicate. What about meaning, you may ask? Well, meaning is a concomitant property, not a defining one. The Noun class always includes words referring to people, animals, and things (boy, dog, stone) and the verb Basics of a language 39 class always includes words referring to activities (jumping, eating, talking). The important point is that the semantic content of word classes does not exactly coincide between languages. Words expressing notions such as “mother” must surely be Nouns, you might suggest. Well, in most languages they are, but not in all. Yuman languages, from southern California, express these notions by transitive verbs, ‘be mother of’ (Halpern 1942). Once you think about it, this is quite natural – the relationship necessarily involves two people, the mother and the child. Most Nouns in Latin correspond to Nouns in English, but not all. For example, the idea of needing to eat is expressed through Noun hunger in English, and by verb e ¯surio in Latin.
eBook - PDF- Martin J. Endley(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
6 Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar look at these two approaches to word categorization in more detail and, in the process, attempt to characterize Nouns as a syntactic category. What Is a Noun? In many of the world’s languages (not only English), young native speakers apparently begin to acquire Nouns before they acquire other types of word. The reasons for this are not fully understood, although it seems likely that it has do to with the fact that many Nouns refer to concrete, easily perceivable objects in the immediate vicinity of the child. But what is a Noun? One way of answering this question involves a consideration of the morphosyntax of Nouns. This approach, which tends to be the one favored by the majority of contemporary linguists, attempts to categorize Nouns in terms of their structure (their morphology) and the other kinds of words they will combine with (their syntax). To see what this means, consider the following sentence: (1) The kitten loved ice cream. This is a perfectly grammatical sentence in modern English. It is syntac- tically well-formed and semantically meaningful. It will not have taken you very long to realize that there are a very large number of words that could readily replace kitten in the above sentence without affecting the grammati- cality. (Linguists will often replace one word with another in this way, a process known as a substitution test, in order to test their ideas about the grammar they are studying.) Among the more obvious substitutes are child, dog, president, but there are, of course, literally hundreds of others. Thus, each of the sentences in (2) is also a grammatical sentence: (2) a. The child loved ice cream. b. The dog loved ice cream. c. The president loved ice cream. We can say, then, that the English words kitten, child, dog, and president share the same distribution, since they are all able to appear in the following frame: (3) Article ________ Verb
eBook - PDFLanguage, Frogs and Savants
More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles and Polemics
- Neil Smith(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
To understand this we need a theory, and that is what linguistics provides. I The Meaning of ‘Language’ That linguistics is ‘the scientific study of language’ has become a cliché, but what it means to be ‘scientific’ may not always be obvious, and what people mean when they use the word ‘language’ varies from occasion to occasion. Consideration of what is involved in being scientific is deferred till section V; for now it suffices to observe that only a few aspects of language have been illuminated by theoretical (scientific) linguistics, so there are many areas where it has little, if anything, helpful to say. The situation is akin to that in biology, viewed as the science of living things. Despite their importance to us, biology has nothing to say about the definition of pets; similarly, despite their relevance to us, linguistics has nothing to say about the definition of dialects. In everyday usage, ‘language’ is used differently depending on whether it is construed as a property of the individual, of society, of the species, or as an autonomous entity in the world. Linguists working in the tradition of ‘generative’ grammar, the framework which has dominated linguistics for the last fifty years, argue that an ‘individual’ approach to language is logically prior to any other, but, in principle, we have the possible domains in (1), each sug-gesting different kinds of question: 1. Language and the Individual Language and the Brain Language and Society Language and the Species Language and Literature Language and the World Looking at ‘Language and the Individual’, the central question raised is ‘what constitutes our ‘knowledge of language’? What prop-erties or attributes does one have to have to be correctly described as a speaker of English, or Burmese, or any other ‘natural language’ – the term linguists use to refer to languages naturally acquired
- Alex Barber, Robert J Stainton(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
Linguistics: Discipline of 383 The situation is akin to that in biology, viewed as the science of living things. Despite their importance to us, biology has nothing to say about the definition of pets; similarly, despite their relevance to us, linguistics has nothing to say about the definition of dialects. In everyday usage, ‘language’ is used differently, depending on whether it is construed as a property of the individual, of society, of the species, or as an autonomous entity in the world. Linguists working in the tradition of ‘generative’ grammar, the framework that has dominated linguistics for the last 50 years, argue that an ‘individual’ approach to language is logically prior to any other, but in principle we have the possible domains shown in (1), each suggesting different kinds of questions: (1) Language and the Individual Language and the Brain Language and Society Language and the Species Language and Literature Language and the World Looking at ‘Language and the Individual’, the central question raised is ‘what constitutes our ‘‘knowledge of language’’?’ What properties or attri-butes does one have to have to be correctly described as a speaker of English, or Burmese, or any other ‘natural language’ – the term linguists use to refer to languages naturally acquired and spoken by humans, as opposed to the ‘artificial’ languages of logic or computing? An extension of this question is how and where knowledge of language is represented in the brain, and what mechanisms need to be postu-lated to enable us to account for our use of this knowledge. Neurolinguistics is an area of remark-able growth, supported by technological advances in imaging.
eBook - PDFOn Languages and Language
The Presidential Adresses of the 1991 Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
- Werner Winter(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
3.4. Languages as a postulate of linguistics The very languages which we study are not simply there, but they are given to our experience by virtue of our postulating them first. This is a necessary (not a sufficient) condition of their existence. Has it not often been noted that those pure languages that linguists work on do not exist as separately observable facts? True, they do not. Languages exist in contact, there is no speaker who knows all the vocabulary of his mother tongue (as we saw in section 1.3), and many speakers know at least some odd bits of other languages, for instance the Frenchman using macho (borrowed from English, borrowed into English from Spanish). Is this word French? Is it English? Is it Spanish? The answer is less than obvious, as it does not easily fit into the pigeonholes we have set up. At any rate, languages (plural count Noun) are given to us not as objective facts to try inductive definitions on: A language is.... They are given to us as the constituent category of linguistics, and problems of adequacy do arise in working with this category. As Eberhard Zwirner (1967: 2454) has pointed out, the linguist studies (oral or written) texts interpreting them as data of (one or several) languages. The literary scholar interprets texts as structured wholes. The historian interprets texts as documenting what happened in the past. The three specialists will, at least in some instances, interpret the same text, say the Bible. What constitutes the difference between linguistics, literary scholarship, and historical scholarship can, consequently, not be different objects of investigation. It can only be in the Leitgedanken that the observer brings to bear on those objects. Zwirner believed that the set of the autonomous disciplines of science was relatively small (approximately a dozen) and that it could be estab- 222 Herbert Pilch lished by deduction (cf. Pilch 1988 a: 54 — 56).
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
