So far, we’ve looked at some of the suffixes that attach to nouns. This is part of their morphology. Now we can look at the syntax of nouns, considering the kinds of words that occur alongside them.
Nouns occur after Determiners like a, the, and an (also called articles); this, that, these, those (also called demonstrative determiners); and possessive determiners (my, your, her, etc.).
Nouns occur after Numerals, both the Cardinal ones (six, eleven, four thousand) and the Ordinal ones (second, fifteenth).
Nouns occur after Quantifiers, words that express quantity like all, each, both, every, some, several, many, more, less, much, few. (Quantifiers behave differently from other words, so they are a distinct part of speech category, albeit one that your students may not have heard of. I can post something more about them later. Feel free to just ask me, though. And remember that for many of you locals, I make house (classroom) calls!)
And finally, nouns can be modified by (or described by) Adjectives: the furry kitten, a rainy day. The term modification is one we’ll be exploring in more depth later. And we'll take another look at adjectives too.
Importantly, though, as with the noun morphology, don’t just tell your students all this. Have them figure out by examining sentences that either they have come up with or that you find in texts and looking for nouns. How do they know that something is a noun? It’ll be these kinds of clues, as well as the morphological ones from Lesson 2. The next step will be to summarize all this. We’ve found that a wall chart is a nice way to do this. That’s coming up in Lesson 4.
Here's this lesson as a doc.
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