Nominal (linguistics)

In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties.

The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties.

[1] Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement.

Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives.

Nominals can be seen in the shared morphemes that attach to the ends of nouns and adjectives and agree in case and gender.

Likewise, 'the dog' and 'wild' share the same morphemes that show they agree in accusative case and masculine gender.

{[The] son} good {[he] loves} {[the] dog.ACC} wild.ACCThe good son loves the wild dog.The earliest study of noun classes was conducted in 1659 on Bantu languages,[2] and this study has to this day undergone only very minor modifications.

These categories share features of case, gender, and number each of which are inflected with different suffixes.

Short form basic inflectional pattern [4] Nominals are a common feature of Indigenous Australian languages, many of which do not categorically differentiate nouns from adjectives.

Within these languages, nouns have historically been classified into certain groups based on shared characteristics.

[7] As can be seen in the table above, in the Sesotho variety of Bantu (spoken mainly in South Africa) there are approximately 15 nominal gender class prefixes.

[7] se-kolose-se-holose-kolo se-se-holo'big school'[7]The following examples from Swahili demonstrate class agreement with the noun, adjective and verb.

[2] The different classes of the nouns in Swahili dictate which prefix will also agree with the adjective and verb.

[2] In the first Swahili example, the noun has the prefix m- because it is part of class 1 for human beings.