1.3.4.2 Nouns

The next category we will discuss is the noun, which we categorised as bearing the features [–F, +N, –V] above. With verbs, they share the property that they have Θ-grids as part of their lexical entries, being [–F] categories. But they are distinguished from verbs on the other two features and hence do not share many other properties.

From a morphological point of view, nouns are less varied than verbs, having just two forms, singular and plural:

Like verbs there is a fair amount of deviation from the regular morphological representation of the plural [s]. Again, we will ignore the morphological irregularities and treat these forms as being syntactically stem + plural:

Besides morphological irregularity, there are also a number of problematic cases. Some nouns express concepts for which number distinctions are not normally made. For example, sand refers to stuff that naturally comes in a quantity for which the division into ‘one’ (singular) and ‘more than one’ (plural) is not particularly natural. Nouns which naturally accommodate this distinction are known as count nouns and those that do not are called mass nouns. If we wish to individuate mass nouns, we usually do this in terms of another noun which names a unit of what the mass noun refers to and put this into a more complicated construction, known as the partitive:

Thus, it is not typical to find plural forms of mass nouns, though, of course, this does not mean that they should not be considered as nouns. As a matter of fact, plural forms of mass nouns do exist, though their uses tend to be rather specialised:

Typically, the plural forms of mass nouns tend to refer to different collections of what the nouns refer to. Take (83c) for example. Here the plural noun breads refers to various types of bread: cottage loaves, whole meal bread, rye bread, baguettes, etc.

Another class of nouns for which the plural form is not entirely natural is the proper nouns, i.e. names. Again, there is probably a semantic reason for this: names name individuals and individuals come in ones. Once again it is possible to find proper nouns used in the plural with the right semantic context:

In the first case, the plural proper noun is used because it refers to two individuals who happen to have the same name (Ronny Corbet and Ronny Barker in this instance). In the second, the family name Smith is used in the plural to refer to the collective set of individuals of that family and in the third case the name Einstein is not used as a name at all, but as a word to describe an individual with certain properties (high intelligence in this case).

Exactly the opposite problem is caused by examples such as scissors and trousers, which appear to be nouns which lack a singular form (*scissor, *trouser). This might be more of a semantic problem rather than a grammatical one however, as the objects to which these words refer are inherently plural in some respect: scissors have two blades and trousers have two legs. Moreover, without this plural aspect to the meaning, the object ceases to be describable in the same way: something with one blade cannot be described as scissors (or scissor for that matter) and something with one leg is not trousers (nor trouser). Again, it is possible to find the singular form of such words used, though in very limited contexts. When two nouns are put together to form a single compound noun, the preceding noun must be in its singular form:

(There are some exceptions, e.g. dogsbody.) Note this restriction holds whether or not the plural form would be more appropriate semantically, as is the case with armchair which tend to have more than one arm! When an inherently plural noun is used as the first noun in a compound, it too appears in its singular form:

In general then, it seems that nouns are a fairly well behaved category and that even for the more problematic cases morphologically distinct forms for singular and plural can be found.

Turning to the distribution of nouns, as with verbs a proper treatment of this will be possible later in this chapter, though we can once again talk about subcategories of noun. Nouns subcategorise in exactly the same way that verbs do, in terms of restrictions placed on the possible categories of their complements. Just as with verbs, the complement of the noun follows it. The similarity between noun complements and verb complements can best be seen by comparing the behaviour of nouns that have been derived from verbs with these verbs:

As seems clear, most nouns that are formed from verbs take exactly the same complements as the original verb does. The one difference can be seen in (87e) where the verb takes a nominal complement while the noun takes a prepositional one. Note that the verb and its complement express exactly the same relationship as the noun and its complement: in both cases it is ‘the bomb’ that gets detonated. Thus, the preposition of in the case of the noun complement does not seem to add anything of a semantic nature. Moreover, this is an entirely regular process – any verb that has a nominal complement will take a prepositional complement (with of) when it is formed into a noun:

Indeed, there are no nouns that take following nominal complements, even ones that are not formed from verbs:

For some reason then, it seems that the whole class of nouns fails to have nominal complements and thus they differ from verbs in this way (we will see later on in this book there is an explanation for this observation). However, other than this, nouns can take any other kind of complement and as such we can propose that they subcategorise in the same way as verbs do, by the inclusion of a subcategorisation frame in their lexical entries.

This inability to take nominal complements is something nouns share with adjectives, as we shall see. Verbs pattern with prepositions in this respect. Thus we can claim that whatever property it is that allows verbs and prepositions to take nominal complements, it is connected to the [–N] feature that they both share. The [+N] categories (nouns and adjectives) obviously lack this property.

It is clear from the examples given above that nouns formed from verbs have arguments in the same way that those verbs do: the noun wait may express the relationship between someone who is waiting and what they are waiting for. The argument that comes to the left of the verb is typically expressed by the possessor of the derived noun (his and my and their in (87)). In other instances, however, the possessor simply names the one who possesses the noun. The difference is made clear in the two interpretations of the following:

This can be interpreted either as something that Ken did (he constructed a kite) or something that he possesses (the kite is his). Obviously the possessive interpretation is only available for the case of the noun, the related verb cannot have a possessive argument:

In this example, Ken can only be interpreted as agent. The question arises as to whether the possessor is another thematic argument which nouns can have, in addition to agents, patients, themes, goals, etc., or whether it is something of a different nature. There is reason to believe that the possessor is not the same kind of element as a thematic argument. One thing that differentiates possessors from other arguments is that the possessor may appear with almost any noun and does not appear to be determined by the noun’s meaning:

Of course there are things named by nouns that cannot be possessed in this way:

In this example, Emily has to be interpreted as the one who experiences the embarrassment rather than someone who possesses it outside of their emotions. But this is a general semantic fact: some things can be possessed and other things cannot. The fact remains, however, that of those things that are able to be possessed, the relationship between them and the possessor is uniform and is not affected by the meaning of the noun. This is very different from other argument–predicate relationships:

Another difference between the possessor and arguments is that the semantic relationship that possessors express is rather vague in relation to those expressed by arguments. Consider the following:

The relationship between Shufflebotham and the sheep could be almost anything, ranging from ownership to something far more distant such as the sheep that Shufflebotham selected in a sheep of the year contest. Thematic arguments, on the other hand, have very definite interpretations: an agent is someone who consciously performs an action and cannot be interpreted as anything else.

A final difference between possessors and arguments is that the possessor relationship is restricted to nouns whereas thematic relationships seem to be available to all thematic categories: we can find themes, experiencers, etc. for verbs, nouns or adjectives.

For these reasons, therefore, we will not consider the possessor to be a thematic role included in the lexical entry of the nouns, but something that can be added to any compatible noun. Below we can see some example lexical entries for nouns: