Early literacy may compromise grammatical learning

Learning how to read may have some disadvantages for learning grammar. Children who cannot read yet often treat multiword phrases as wholes ("how-are-you"). After learning to read, children notice individual words more, as ...

Researchers reveal link between job titles and gender equality

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) have revealed a link between role nouns (e.g. job titles) in gendered languages and gender equality. The study, which examined whether the masculine form ...

Nouns slow down our speech

Speakers hesitate or make brief pauses filled with sounds like "uh" or "uhm" mostly before nouns. Such slow-down effects are far less frequent before verbs, as UZH researchers working together with an international team have ...

A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian

When it comes to numbers, Russian grammar has a bewildering thicket of rules. A singular noun such as "table" ("stol" in Russian), used as the subject of a sentence, takes a special "case form" called the nominative singular. ...

Dog or Dogs? When do children learn the difference?

Researchers at Macquarie University's Child Language Laboratory (in the Australian Hearing Hub) are one step closer to identifying a question that has long perplexed linguists and parents alike: when do children understand ...

New language discovery reveals linguistic insights

A new language has been discovered in a remote Indigenous community in northern Australia that is generated from a unique combination of elements from other languages. Light Warlpiri has been documented by University of Michigan ...

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Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition (or put more simply, a noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing or abstract idea).

Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

In traditional English grammar, the noun is one of the eight parts of speech.

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