The Noun.
Nouns form the heads of noun phrases which are in turn arguments of
predicators.
For example, the noun fire refers to an event involving
burning while the word burn relates arguments to an event. If we say:
The fire burned the book.
[ il7riq 7iraqat ilbeytI
‘The fire burned the book’
English
Qatari Arabic
(translation)
The word fire is a noun that refers to something (an event) and the verb
burn is a way of relating to that something (that event).
I. The Sub-classes of Nouns:
The class of nouns employs terms to refer to people, places, things.
activities, states, events, and abstract qualities.
These different references
are made through the following sub-classes of nouns:
Proper Nouns and Common Nouns.
In some languages of the world, nouns are inflected for
gender, which means that the noun could be masculine,feminine and
neuter as in German.
Some languages show only masculine and feminine
distinctions as in French. Other languages carry no gender at all as in English.
Nouns are marked for the plural in most languages of the world:
and Qatari Arabic nouns are also inflected for the plural and the dual.
The sub-classes of nouns will be discussed with respect to the areas of
gender, number and the use of the article in addition to distinctions such
as definite I indefinite and specific I generic. Therefore it is necessary to get acquainted with the terms gender,number, and particle.