Nouns, Gender, Number, Articles, and Adjectives: A Linguistic Analysis
Nouns: Classification and Characteristics
Classes of Nouns:
- Common Nouns: Words representing realities that form classes, sharing qualities. They can maintain content, including relationships of synonymy, antonymy, and polysemy.
- Proper Nouns: Words used to identify and refer to individual beings. They lack lexical meaning and cannot be defined. Proper names are assigned to people, animals, and places.
- Concrete Nouns: Refer to realities that can be perceived by the senses.
- Abstract Nouns: Refer to things not perceived by the senses but by the collective mind.
- Singular Nouns: Refer to uniform sets consisting of individuals of the same nature.
- Plural Nouns: Opposing groups that do not presuppose the existence of a set.
- Countable Nouns: Realities that can be assigned a number or counted with cardinal numerals.
- Uncountable Nouns: Realities that do not support designation with numerals.
Gender in Nouns
The Gender: A grammatical property comprising two kinds of nouns: masculine and feminine. Its essential function is to establish a special concordance.
Cases of Gender:
- Common Gender: Nouns unchanged in their own desinence. Some nouns are masculine and feminine because they can be combined with articles and adjectives, but their desinence remains unchanged.
- Epicene Gender: Nouns that do not reflect the sex of the animal or human concerned in their endings or combined forms with articles or adjectives. Examples include ‘flea’ and ‘ant’, which are always feminine, or ‘mosquito’, which is always masculine.
- Ambiguous Gender: Nouns that can vary in ending or just meaning, and can be combined with articles and adjectives.
Heteronymy
The Heteronymy: The action of using different terms for males and females to mark the gender of sexed beings.
Number in Nouns
The Number: An inflectional morpheme that indicates whether the noun is singular or plural. It performs two functions:
- Indicate unity (singular number) or plurality (plural number).
- Indicate agreement with articles, adjectives, and verbs.
The Article
The Article: From a semantic point of view, the article limits the meaning of the noun it accompanies. From a syntactic standpoint, the article can play two functions:
- To function as a determinant when accompanying a noun.
- To function as a sustantivator (adjective) when accompanying an adjective.
The Adjective
The Adjective: A category of speech that determines the noun it accompanies or expresses any of its properties or qualities. According to how they modify the noun, adjectives may be determinative or relational.
Qualifiers and Relational Adjectives:
- Qualifiers: Accompany the noun and express concrete realities.
- Relational Adjectives: Bring a quality to the noun.
Adjectives can be defined from different points of view:
- Morphological: They have gender and number morphemes that allow them to match the adjectives they accompany.
- Semantic: They express qualities of the nouns or classify them.
- Syntactic: They can function as a complement, attribute, or predicative of the noun.
Classes of Adjectives:
According to whether they restrict or not restrict the meaning of the noun, we distinguish two kinds of adjectives:
- Specified Adjectives: Limit the meaning of the noun by separating it from everything else that belongs to the same class.
- Explanatory Adjectives: Do not limit the meaning but are only intended to highlight a quality.