Concept: noun

Definition

A noun is a °root that denotes an object.

Comments

"Noun" is defined here in notional terms, following Haspelmath (2023) (see also this blogpost: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/3467). Many authors define "noun" also (or alternatively) in terms of coding strategies, but languages show substantial differences in this respect. The definition proposed by Lehmann & Moravcsik (2000: 733) has the downside that one does not know how salient the grammatical properties need to be in order to single out a grammatical class (and distinguish it, say, from a formally defined adjective class).

Wikipedia

noun

SIL Glossary

noun

Quotation

"Languages have a class of expressions which designate entities, i.e. concepts that are reified, and which can be used to refer to specific en- tities. The prototypical representatives of this kind of concept are concrete individual physical objects such as a bird or an apple. The status of this class of expressions in the language system may vary. It need not, in principle, be a grammatical class, let alone one definable by morphological criteria. However, if there are grammatical criteria for assigning words (lexemes) to a class with these semantic properties, then this is the class of nouns of the language." (Lehmann & Moravcsik 2000: 733)

Sources

Haspelmath 2023; Lehmann and Moravcsik 2000