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A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Walmart) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation).
A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs frog, milk) or as concrete and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs embarrassment, prejudice). [4] A grammatical distinction is often made between count (countable) nouns such as clock and city, and non-count (uncountable) nouns such as milk ...
While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun. [4] Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English.
A nominal group is widely regarded as synonymous with noun phrase in other grammatical models. [1] [2] However, there are two major differences between the functional notion of a nominal group and the formal notion of a noun phrase that must be taken into account.
A proper name in linguistics – and in the specific sense employed at Wikipedia – is normally a kind of noun phrase. That is, it has a noun or perhaps another noun phrase as its core component (or head), and perhaps one or more modifiers. Most proper names have a proper noun as their head: Old Trafford; Bloody Mary.
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
The distinction between names and nouns, if made at all, is extremely subtle, [28] although clearly noun refers to names as lexical categories and their function within the context of language, [29] rather that as "labels" for objects and properties.