Lesson 1: The Basics of a Sentence
Noun Attributes and the Articles
noun a word that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance, or quality —Cambridge Dictionary
Paul. Hawaii. Llama. Easter. Toothpaste. Wisdom. These are all nouns. Nouns have various attributes and roles that we need to know. We will start with the attributes.
Noun Attributes
Specificity
Is the noun general—what we call a common noun? Or is it specific—a proper noun? “Boy” is a common noun. There are lots of boys, and the word itself does not tell us which boy we are talking about. But if I say “James,” then I am specifying a certain person, and this is a proper noun. Common nouns do not need to be capitalized (unless they happen to be at the beginning of a sentence), while proper nouns are always capitalized.
Number
Are there many, or only one? If there is only one, then the noun is singular; if there is more than one, then the noun is plural. In English, we indicate plurality by adding an ‘s’ (or ‘es’ in a few cases) to the end of the word. There is one boy (singular), or there are many boys (plural). Proper nouns will usually be singular, as they refer to one specific object. However, there are cases of a plural proper noun, as in “There are four Mollys in our class.”
It is good to understand specificity and number in relation to nouns. However, you will not label these when you parse a sentence. Remember, when we parse a sentence, we are only looking at the role each word plays in the sentence.
Articles
Articles are little words that we use all the time. There are two: a/an and the. “A/an” is the Indefinite Article; it is indefinite because it doesn’t specify. If you say, “A cat woke up,” you are not specifying any particular cat. But if you had just been talking about your new cat, Carl, you would say, “The cat woke up.” “The” is the Definite Article, and it is definite because it specifies (in this example) a particular cat.
In this way, the articles serve to clarify or describe the noun they are modifying. Because of this, they are sometimes considered adjectives (we will cover adjectives later). However in this course, we will label them Art, and group them with the noun they modify.
