In my last post about parts of speech in English we looked at verbs. I mentioned how verbs are perhaps the most important part of speech in English. After all, it is only with verbs that you can have a complete sentence with just one word, for example: “Run!” This is a command and a complete sentence.
Today we are going to look at nouns. After verbs, nouns are the second most important part of speech, in my opinion. In my last post, we left off looking at subjects and predicates of sentences, now we’ll return to that by focusing on the subject of sentences. It is important to note that the subject of a sentence always includes a noun. So, you might be asking yourself, what are nouns anyway?
Nouns
It’s not easy to describe a noun. The simplest way to describe a noun is to say, nouns are “things” (and remember verbs are “actions”). For example, ‘book’ is a noun and ‘read’ is an action (verb) you do with that noun. Also, ‘person’ is a noun, person is who you are, ‘are’ is the state (verb) of being a person. Thus, the best definition of a noun is: A noun is a person, place, or thing.
Following I have three additional helpful pieces of information about nouns.
1) Nouns are either singular or plural. Generally you add s to a noun to make it plural (but there are irregular nouns in English that break this rule.)
Regular nouns: dog/dogs, bottle/bottles, kite/kites
Irregular nouns: person/people, city/cities
2) Nouns are either common or proper. Proper nouns have two differences from common nouns, proper nouns: a) name a specific, often a one-of-a-kind item, and b) begin with a capital letter.
Common nouns: dog, table, computer
Proper nouns: Beth, Minnesota, July
3) Nouns can show possession (who they belong to). To show possession you usually add ‘s to the noun.
Possessive nouns: Bob’s son, my sister’s car
This is the basic information you need to know about nouns to use them in sentences. Remember the subject of a sentence always includes a noun. Now with the two parts of speech we have covered so far (verbs and nouns) you can make many short complete sentence, for example: “Jenny cooks.” or “Bob sings.” To add more information and description to your sentences you will need more parts of speech. I will continue to review two more parts of speech tomorrow.
