Of occurrence.

19. Noun as a part of speech

A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in) definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase.

The word "noun" derives from the Latin nomen meaning "name", and a traditional definition of nouns is that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality or idea. They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that verbs like kill or die refer to events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives like yellow or difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside or upstairs seem to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of speech.

Case, number, and gender

In sentences, noun phrases may function in a variety of different ways, the most obvious being as subjects or objects. For example, in the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects (of which "letter" is a noun and "me" a pronoun). These different roles are known as noun cases. Variant forms of the same noun—such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)—are called declensions.

The number of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the simplest case, number distinguishes between singular ("man") and plural ("men"). Some languages, like Arabic (and also Saami and Aleut ) also distinguish dual from plural.

Many languages (though not English) have a concept of noun gender, also known as noun class, whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or feminine.

Category of number.

English countable nouns have 2 categories of number:

singular

plural

І. The plural form is formed be adding the ending -s, -es, pronounced as /z/, /s/, /iz/.

2. if the noun ends in –y presided by a consonant. –y is changed into –i + -es-

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