Typical Common Nouns
car shoe computer
baby disk pad
elephant book star
speaker politician movie
picture telephone jacket
ring banana flowerProper nouns,on the other hand, are specific names, such as Mr. Spock, the
Empire State Building, Ford Escort, and the Chicago Bulls.
Mass nouns are a special category of common nouns. What makes them dis-
tinct is that, unlike simple common nouns, they cannot be counted. Below is a
short list of mass nouns:
deer air mud
research meat knowledge
furniture wisdom butterTeaching Tip
Nonnative English speakers, particularly those from Asia, have a very difficult
time with mass nouns. Japanese and Chinese, for example, do not differenti-
ate between count nouns and mass nouns, treating both as a single category.
As a result, we often find these students treating a mass noun as a count noun.
It is important to understand in such instances that the problem stems from a
conflict between English and the students’ home language. One way to help
them better distinguish between count nouns and common nouns is to pre-
pare a list of frequently used mass nouns for study.Pronouns
English, like other languages, resists the duplication of nouns in sentences, so it
replaces duplicated nouns with what are calledpronouns.(No one is sure why
languages resist such duplication.) The nouns that get replaced are calledante-
cedents.Consider sentence 5:
- *Fred liked Macarena, so Fred took Macarena to a movie.^2
60 CHAPTER 3
(^2) The asterisk at the beginning of the sentence signifies that it is ungrammatical. This convention will
be used throughout the text from this point on.