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A noun (from Latin ''nōmen'', literally meaning "name") is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.〔Example nouns for: *Living creatures (including people, alive, dead or imaginary): ''mushrooms, dog, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebush, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, Klingons'', etc. *Physical objects: ''hammer, pencils, Earth, guitar, atom, stones, boots, shadow'', etc. *Places: ''closet, temple, river, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, Utopia'', etc. *Actions: ''swimming, exercise, diffusion, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement'', etc. *Qualities: ''color, length, deafness, weight, roundness, symmetry, warp speed,'' etc. *Mental or physical states of existence: ''jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, mind meld,'' etc. *Ideas or abstract entities: ''musicianship, cooperativeness, perfection, ''The New York Times'', mathematics, impossibility,'' etc.〕 Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech 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.〔Loos, Eugene E., et al. 2003. (Glossary of linguistic terms: What is a noun? )〕 Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase. == History == Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's ''Nirukta'', the noun (''nāma'') is one of the four main categories of words defined.〔Bimal Krishna Matilal, ''The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language'', 1990 (Chapter 3)〕 The Ancient Greek equivalent was ''ónoma'' (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the ''Cratylus'' dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in ''The Art of Grammar'', attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was ''nōmen''. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name".〔; 〕 The English word ''noun'' is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman ''noun''. The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number. Because adjectives share these three grammatical categories, adjectives are placed in the same class as nouns. Similarly, the Latin ''nōmen'' includes both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did the English word ''noun'', the two types being distinguished as ''nouns substantive'' and ''nouns adjective'' (or ''substantive nouns'' and ''adjective nouns'', or short ''substantives'' and ''adjectives''). (The word ''nominal'' is now sometimes used to denote a class that includes both nouns and adjectives.) Many European languages use a cognate of the word ''substantive'' as the basic term for noun (for example, Spanish ''sustantivo'', "noun"). Nouns in the dictionaries of such languages are demarked by the abbreviation ''s.'' or ''sb.'' instead of ''n.'', which may be used for proper nouns or neuter nouns instead. In English, some modern authors use the word ''substantive'' to refer to a class that includes both nouns (single words) and noun phrases (multiword units, also called noun equivalents). It can also be used as a counterpart to ''attributive'' when distinguishing between a noun being used as the head (main word) of a noun phrase and a noun being used as a noun adjunct. For example, the noun ''knee'' can be said to be used substantively in ''my knee hurts'', but attributively in ''the patient needed knee replacement''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「noun」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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