Syntactic function nab
abstract noun (of which there is a wide semantic variety with a variety of syntactic properties)
Criteria one can try to use to determine whether a given noun is abstract: 1. cannot be counted with classifiers and are counted - if at all - not by physical items (see nab.c "counted abstract nouns") 2. cannot be quantified by universal, existential or graded quantifiers 3. cannot be specified with respect to amounts of any concrete stuff 4. the object designated by the n cannot be said to move in space Criteria for some basic related subclassifications of nouns Nouns that can be counted and quantified by items or concrete things are called count nouns nc. Nouns that cannot be counted or quantified by concrete items but can be quantified by amounts or kinds rather than items are regarded as mass nouns and these are called nm. When nm are preceded by a demonstrative pronoun, the interpretation is "this kind of nm". The identification and the semantic subclassification of abstract nouns poses insurmountable problems because abstraction clearly is a matter of degrees on the one hand, and abstraction is a heterogeneous phenomenon. The vague and necessarily overlapping semantic subcategories introduced so far are no more than a first aid towards a resolution of these severe and unresolved analytical problems. Perhaps one should have opted for no subcategorisation at all, but we have decided to make a preliminary attempt to sort the material into major groups, even at the risk of having to make many arbitrary decisions in this process of preliminary sorting.
Usage
- Lexical entries:
- Found 13984 attributions