Study English Grammar

Nouns:

Noun is nothing but a word or a group of words used as the name of a class of people (E.g. Teacher, Englishman, Sarah), places (E.g. Park, library, India), things (E.g. Cup, book, milk) of a specific person, place or thing. A noun can either be singular (i.e.) a pen or plural (i.e.) two pens.

Classification of nouns:

Noun can be classified into common nouns and proper nouns, countable and uncountable nouns, collective nouns and concrete and abstract nouns.

Common and Proper nouns:

Common nouns are those which denote a class of entities like city, person and planet as against Proper nouns which denotes unique entities like India, John, and Jupiter. Common nouns are generic and proper nouns are more specific.

Countable and uncountable nouns:

Countable nouns are those which can take a plural word and can combine with quantifiers and numerals for example, one, four, every, most and several.  A countable noun can take an indefinite article (a or an). Examples for countable nouns are nose, occasion and chair. Uncountable nouns are also called as mass nouns and the uncountable nouns cannot take plural and cannot combine with quantifiers and numerals for example, helium, laughter. In this example we cannot say a helium or four heliums. This is called uncountable nouns.

Collective nouns:

Collective nouns are those which refer to a group consisting of more than one entity, even when they are modified for the singular. Examples are school, committee and herd.

Concrete and abstract nouns:

Concrete nouns are sense that can observe physical bodies. For example, apple, chair and john are concrete nouns. On the other hand, abstract nouns refer to abstract objects like concepts or ideas. For example, hatred, justice is abstract nouns.

Pronoun:

Pronoun is the part of speech, which is used as a substitute for an antecedent noun, which is understood clearly and with which it agrees in gender, number and person.

Types of pronouns:

Pronouns are classified as follows:

Personal pronoun: This stands in the place of the name of thing or people.

Subjective pronoun: This is used when a thing or a person is the subject of the clause or the sentence.

Intensive pronoun: This pronoun reemphasizes the pronoun or noun that has already been used in the sentence.

Objective pronoun: This is used when a thing or a person is the object of the clause or the sentence.

Reflexive pronoun: This is a used when a thing or a person acts on itself.

Reciprocal pronoun: This is used to refer reciprocal relationship between people.

Disjunctive pronoun: This is used in certain special grammatical contexts or in isolation.

Indefinite pronoun: This refers to general category of things or people.

Nouns and pronouns:

Pronouns can typically replace the noun phrases like it, which, he and those so that repetition or explicit identification can be avoided. For instance in the sentence ‘Jessy thought that she was weird, the word she is a pronoun, which stands in the place of the name of a person in question.