The noun.

Its grammatical categories

A grammatical category is a class of units (such as noun and verb) or features

(such as number and case) that share a common set of characteristics.

They are the building blocks of language, allowing us to communicate with one
another. There are no hard and fast rules for what defines these shared traits,
however, making it difficult for linguists to agree on precisely what is and is not a
grammatical category.

As the linguist and author R.L. Trask put it, the term category in linguistics

"is so varied that no general definition is possible; in practice, a category is simply

any class of related grammatical objects which someone wants to consider."

That said, there are some strategies you can use to group words into categories
based on how they function in the English language. (Think of parts of speech.)

Identifying Grammar Groups

One of the simplest ways to create grammatical categories is by grouping words

together based on their class. Classes are word sets that display the same formal
properties, such as inflection or verb tense.

Put another way, grammatical categories can be defined as sets of words with
similar meanings (called semantics.)

There are two families of classes:

 lexical
 functional

The lexical class includes:

 nouns
 verbs
 adjectives
 adverbs

The functional class includes:

 determiners
  particles
 prepositions
 modals
 qualifiers
 question words
 conjunctions
 other words denoting position or spatial relationships

Using this definition, you can create grammatical categories like this:

 Verbs denote actions (go, destroy, buy, eat, etc.)

 Nouns denote entities (car, cat, hill, John, etc.)
 Adjectives denote states (ill, happy, rich, etc.)
 Adverbs denote manner (badly, slowly, painfully, cynically, etc.)
 Prepositions denote location (under, over, outside, in, on, etc.)

Grammar groups can be further divided, depending on a word's defining

properties. Nouns, for instance, can be further subdivided
into number, gender, case, and countability. Verbs can be subdivided by
tense, aspect, or voice.

A word can be classified into more than one grammatical category. For instance, a
word can be both plural and feminine.

Grammar Tips

Unless you are a linguist, you probably won't spend much time thinking about
how words can be classified based on how they function in the English language.
But just about anyone can identify basic parts of speech.

Be careful, though. Some words have multiple functions, such as "watch," which
can function as both a verb ("Watch out over there!") and a noun ("My watch is
broken.")

Other words, such as gerunds, may appear to be one part of speech (a verb) and
yet function differently (as a noun.) ("Buying a house is difficult in this economy.")
In these cases, you'll need to pay close attention to the context in which such
words are used in writing or speech.

The noun is a part of speech which unites words with the general categorical
meaning of substance, or thingness. Nouns are the most numerous class of words
(42% of all words)`
The class of nouns is constituted by the following grammatical categories:
Number (singular , plural); Case (common and possessive); Gender (masculine,
feminine, neutral)

Gender of nouns may be defined by 3 ways:

1)system of personal pronouns (he, she, it);2) special suffixes -er(-or) , -ess
(waitress);

3) lexical units which express the idea of gender (niece – nephew; bull – cow)

Common gender. Some nouns which can may both a female or a male person
they belong to so call common gender (doctor, president). Animate nouns: he ,
she. Inanimate nouns - it.

The grammatical category of number in the English noun presents a specific

linguistic reflection of quantitative relations between homogeneous objects of
reality conceptualized by the human mind. It is constituted by the binary privative
opposition of singular and plural forms.

From the point of view of their number characteristics the English nouns fall into
two classes: countable (исчисл) and uncountable. Uncountable nouns are further
subdivided into two groups: The group of Singularia Tantum includes: Names of
abstract notions (love, friendship); Names of mass materials (bread, butter,
sugar); Names of some collective inanimate objects (foliage, machinery); Names
of sciences and professional activities (medicine, architecture); Nouns of
heterogeneous semantics. This is a limited group and includes such nouns as: hair,
advice, knowledge, money, information, news. The group of Pluralia
Tantum nouns includes: Nouns denoting objects consisting of two parts (trousers,
spectacles); Nouns denoting results of repeated processes (savings, labours,
belongings); Nouns of multitude (police, gentry, poultry, cattle) Nouns of various
semantics (oats, outskirts, clothes)

The grammatical category of case in English nouns. Case is a grammatical

category which marks the semantic role of the noun in the sentence and finds a
grammatical expression in the language.

The roles played by the noun in the sentence in its relations with the verb and
other parts of the sentence may find different expression in different languages.
In highly inflectional, synthetic languages these relations are expressed
morphologically, by inflexions. Case relations may also be expressed syntactically:
by the position of the noun in the sentence in its reference to the position of the
verb and also by prepositions which play the same role as inflections.
The category of case of the English noun is constituted by the binary privative
opposition of the Common and Possessive cases. The formal marker of the
Possessive case is the morpheme ‘s.

The most common syntagmatic meanings of the Possessive case are the
following: pure possessivity (my sister’s money); agent, or subject of the
action (my brother’s arrival); object of the action (the criminal’s arrival);
authorship (Shakespeare’s sonnets); destination (a sailor’s uniform); measure
(a day’s wait); location (at the dean’s); description, or comparison (a lion’s
courage).