When is a noun a noun?

Answer 1

A noun is a word for a person, place, or thing.

A noun is a noun when its function in the clause is as "subject". That is, you can tell that a noun is a noun when it allows for certain structural variations. For example: a noun is a noun when you can make it plural (1 computer, 2 computers). This does not always work though (there is no 1 admiration, 2 admirations for example). The other way you can tell that a word is a noun is whether you can give it the quality of possessing by adding *-'s* onto it. For example we know *John* is a noun because we can say "John's book". However, in the clause "John walks home", we know "walk" is not a noun because we cannot say "walk's John." We can say though, "John's walk (home)."

The same goes for abstract nouns such as "admiration". Take for example this sentence:

"Admiration's end is when pride gets too big for its boots."

You can usually also tell a word is a noun because a verb immediately follows it and will agree with the preceding noun's number to make the clause grammatically correct. Take admiration again:

"[Admiration is a great thing]1 [to which to aspire.]2"

Two things here tell you *admiration* is a noun. One, the verb "to be" follows the noun and agrees with its [3rd person] singular inflexion [=is] . Two, the pronoun "which" in the relative clause 2 refers back to the concept admiration. We know "which" is a relative pronoun and when we look back at the clause to which it refers we see it refers to the concept "admiration", which word therefore must be a noun, because relative pronouns always refer back to their nouns.

These are some structural/functional ways of determining what kind of word a word is. They don't require you to know what the word means as such. They only require you to know how it works in the clause and what you can do with it grammatically. If you know these rules you can work out the word's function in the clause without even knowing its meaning.

The German language has a cool way of letting you know when a noun is a noun: they simply make the first letter of any noun a capital letter. They would not write: "a cold winter", but "ein kalter Winter".

Answer 2

A noun is a part of speech that represents a person, place, thing, or idea. It typically serves as the subject of a sentence or as the object that receives the action of a verb. Nouns can be identified by their ability to be preceded by articles such as "the," "a," or "an."

Answer 3

No. "When" is a question word like "how" and "why".