English nouns
[5] English pronouns are a closed category of words that have a variety of features distinguishing them from common and proper nouns.
Also unlike common nouns, English pronouns show distinctions in case (e.g., I, me, mine), person (e.g., I, you) and gender (e.g., he, she).
Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep).
Second, the plural morpheme may be absent specifically in noun phrases denoting weights and measures but not in other situations.
This method of plural marking for weights and measures occurs in certain rural varieties of Southern U.S. English.
[16] Traditional grammars suggest that English nouns can also take genitive case endings, as in the –'s in the cat's paws.
On top of this, they may have many other semantic characteristics including definiteness, reference, specificity, number, quantification, gender, and person.
[19] For example, one of the things that apple denotes is "a common, round fruit produced by the tree Malus domestica, cultivated in temperate climates.
[27] A natural gender is one "in which there is a clear correlation between masculine and feminine nouns and biological traits in the referent.
[32] Some defining properties of English nouns are that they function as the heads of NPs and that they can be specified by determinatives and modified by pre-head adjective phrases.
A defining property of English NPs is that they prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements.
Noun phrases that realize the determinative function are typically in the genitive case (e.g., your interview) but do not need to be (e.g., this size home).
In the noun phrase pay-as-you-go SIM card, for instance, the clause pay as you go functions as a pre-head modifier.
In some of these cases, the complement and noun can be compared to a verb and direct object pair (we reviewed your application; you received the envelope).
Clauses that function as complements in noun phrases can be either finite (a realization that it is important) or non-finite (a requirement for them to do it).
[47] These elements are present in the example below: These ordering constraints are called rigid because violating them results in an ungrammatical noun phrase.
[47] Much attention has been given to the order of pre-noun internal modifiers in both academic and popular writings on English grammar.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, for example, proposes the following order for residual pre-head modifiers: evaluative (e.g., good, annoying), general property (e.g., big, cruel), age (e.g., new, ancient), color (e.g., black, crimson), provenance (e.g., French, Chinese), manufacture (e.g., cotton, carved), type (e.g., passenger aircraft, men's department).
[47] Mark Forsyth suggests that adjectives must occur in the following order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
[48] Stefanie Wulff summarizes and evaluates a variety of other factors that predict the order of pre-head modifiers in English noun phrases.
Though modifiers tend not to occur between complements and their heads, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does not characterize this tendency as a rigid ordering constraint because the order is also affected by the weight of the constituent, with lighter dependents typically occurring before heavy dependents.
[47] In the noun phrase the rumor in the city that Minakshi had decreed that no white woman could live for long within sight of her temple, for example, the modifier in the city separates the head rumor from the complement that Minakshi had decreed that no white woman could live for long within sight of her temple because the complement is relatively heavy while the modifier is relatively light.
However, James D. McCawley notes a case in which color terms appear to have features of nouns and adjectives at the same time: a deep blue necktie.
In this case, the modifier of blue is an adjective (deep) rather than an adverb (deeply), which suggests that the color term is a noun.
[55] Bas Aarts notes that this apparent dual categorization can be avoided by treating phrases like deep blue as adjective-adjective compounds.
Complicating matters further, they can take as pre-head modifiers either adjectives (the ostentatious rich) or adverbs (the completely innocent).
[53] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language offers a similar analysis, calling words like lucky and innocent in these cases "fused modifier-heads".
For example, Barbara M. H. Strang notes that words such as yesterday and today have features of both nouns and adverbs.
[64] These characteristics have led linguists like Ray Jackendoff and Steven Paul Abney to categorize such uses of we and you as determiners.
[69][70] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language similarly classifies this use of we and you as "an extended, secondary use" in which words that began as pronouns have been reanalyzed as determiners.
