Deidre's students sorting nouns: abstract and concrete

Variants of this noun morphology lesson are getting lots of action. As a follow up to this discussion of abstract and concrete nouns, Deidre's students explored this distinct in more depth. Here is an image of students sorting nouns into abstract and concrete.

And another, where they've made three categories, clearly abstract, clearly concrete, and not sure.

They then put them on the board. Where there was complete consensus, those words went in the "clearly" columns. (Some of these we would want to come back to and discuss some more - money, for example.)

From there, we turned to the noun suffixes discussed in this lesson and in its comments.

Dave Pippin's morphology whiteboard

This photo is a fine display of some morphological happenings from Dave's 7th grade class last spring.

The Do-Si-Do you can see there is mentioned in this lesson and came from John Horner's 7th graders at Whatcom Middle School.

Send more pictures!

Back to Nouns: Noun Meaning

When I talk with my college students about noun semantics, I mostly reassure them these distinctions (abstract-concrete, mass-count, and proper-common) are true of all languages, and these are real distinctions that we all have in our heads. So it’s all pretty straightforward. Some words, admittedly, are tricky because these semantic notions of abstractness, for example, are hard to pin down. We need to call in the philosophers. Or call in the fourth graders.

Deidre wrote to me that in the course of discussing various nouns last week, her 4th(ish) graders concluded that “actual people, places, things and ideas aren't nouns themselves, but the words for them are nouns. I [Deidre] demonstrated by picking up Tucker (my dog) and saying I wasn't picking up a noun, but that the word Tucker is a noun. All of this created some interesting discussions and challenged their abstract thinking.”

Concrete nouns are simple labels for things that we can see and touch: toad, belly button, rug, Tucker. Abstract nouns are, well, abstract – you can’t see or touch them: love, truth, friendliness. But some words pose a challenge for our definition of abstract. Can you see or touch weather? Or how about unicorn?

Philosophers and semanticists have thought a lot about these things, most agreeing that abstract nouns can be further divided into different subcategories: events and processes that exist but that you can’t actually see (weather, temperature) and other things that are not observable (happiness, freedom). Where does that leave unicorns, ghosts, fairies, and monsters? Ask your students and see what they come up with!

As for count and mass, that’s a real distinction too, and a fairly straightforward one. Count nouns are countable, mass nouns are not.
mass nouns: rice, mud, mail
count nouns: frog, idea, shoe
And there are some handy tests to distinguish these. Count nouns can be pluralized and they can occur with numbers or other words that express quantities: each, both, many, etc. Mass nouns, can’t be pluralized, can’t be counted, and occur with much or less. (But both mass and count nouns can occur with the, all, and some.)

Take some nouns and try them out. Can the noun be pluralized? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with a? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with much? (If so, it’s a mass noun.) Did you find any nouns that work both ways, like light? (I turned on two lights. There is not much light in this room.)

Parenthetical on less: In general, less is used with mass nouns, while fewer is used with count nouns. But less has long been used with count nouns too, in fact. Many a grocery store sign says “10 Items or Less,” and although some people get upset about it, less has been used with countable things ever since English was English. Apparently, King Alfred (the Great) who was a staunch defender of English used it that way in his writings, way back in the 800s. And we’ve seen it ever since. But this isn’t LanguageLog (where I’m sure there are lots of discussions of this. I just checked, and there are here).

So knowing these labels and making our unconscious knowledge of the distinctions into conscious knowledge could make our lives a lot better. Or it could at least make MadLibs a lot funnier. This word game is sometimes the only place that my students have ever encountered parts of speech labels. I like MadLibs. And it reinforces what we already know - that word games are fun, and that even parts of speech are fun (and funny). But the restrictive parts of speech labels that MadLibs offers are sometimes problematic, and not having fine enough distinctions for nouns is one of the issues. So you might have something like

She seized (number) ______ (noun) _______.

And then, say, you write in She seized six rice. Or She seized 10,000 homework. It’s not even funny because the syntax is weird. Rice and homework are mass nouns, not count nouns, and numbers only occur with nouns that are countable. That’s a fact about the language, and should be a fact about MadLibs. These are real distinctions with real labels, and if MadLibs used these finer distinctions, then kids would learn the labels.

So I think we should come up with a better version of MadLibs that has more options – mass noun, count noun, abstract noun, concrete noun, not to mention degree word and quantifier. Who’s in?

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 1: Nonsense and Made-Up Words, Focusing on Nouns

You could start with Lesson 1, the nonsense sentence activity from Strand 1, where the goal is to understand our unconscious knowledge of parts of speech and our use of morphology and syntax in accessing that knowledge. We can figure out a lot about words, categories, and meanings by using morphology, syntax, and even phonology. (The phonology focus will be unique to this strand. We’ll examine, for example, some sound changes and correspondences that can shed light on relationships between words of Latin origin and those of Anglo-Saxon origin.) There’s a great version of this lesson, called “Morphology Games: What making up words reveals,” posted by Christina Galeano on Teachling here.


We can also see how we use morphological knowledge by looking at made-up but “real” words, words you likely have never heard before: unsluglike. How do you know what that means? Because you know the meanings of the parts, the morphemes. What does un- mean? What does the suffix -like mean? The strategy here and in figuring out morpheme meaning in general will be to think of other words that also have that same piece. So, words like unhappy, uninteresting or childlike. (Un- is actually trickier than most morphemes because there are two uns with different meanings that attach to different parts of speech – the un- of unhappy which means ‘not’ and attaches to adjectives, and the un- of untie that means ‘reverse the action’ and attaches to verbs. So that could be a separate lesson or you could choose a word that’s easier to analyze than unsluglike.)

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 3 on Noun Syntax

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.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 2 on Noun Morphology

So if you did the nonsense sentence activity with your students, I’d love to hear how it went. It serves to introduce the idea that we make use of certain morphological and syntactic rules/tools to categorize words.

This morphological information—the different parts they can have, the ways we put those parts together, and the information those different parts convey—is part of what we use to identify a word as a noun. So here’s what we know:

Nouns can be pluralized – One morphological fact about most nouns (see more about the “most” part here) is that they express number, they can be singular or plural. (Some languages have a different form for “dual,” which is pretty cool.) We usually pluralize an English noun by adding -s/-es/-ies in the written form: rats, spiders, bunnies. So if you take your word in question and pluralizing it works, you got yourself a noun.

Here is a short TED Ed video explanation by John McWhorter for some of the odd plurals in English.

Nouns can be made possessive – Another morphological fact about nouns is that they can take the possessive suffix -s. Try attaching the possessive to some words that you know aren’t nouns – they’re terrible. Or it turns that word into a noun. (I follow the linguistic tradition of using * to mark an ungrammatical example.)

*the happy’s hat

*a curious’s question

but

the cat’s tail

the truth’s inevitability

Nouns can have certain other “nominal” suffixes – -ance/ence (perforamance), –ion (formation), -al (refusal), -age (leakage). To find some more of these, try this activity:

Have students come up with words that are created by adding the noun-making suffixes. There’s a table here with some examples. You’ll see that the suffixes will consistently attach to the same part of speech, which is cool too. (Students might notice that some of the suffixes in the table attach to nouns to derive other nouns rather than words of another category.)

What’s the point of this? To show that we all already know what nouns are and how to manipulate them morphologically, by adding the appropriate suffixes. And you get for free some good morphological analysis as words are put together and taken apart.

Here's Lesson 2 as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 1 on Nouns

Take a nonsense sentence. Make up your own or use something like this:

The dorbling groobies frandled a bonkled slank.

Ask students to identify the part of speech of various words. They’ll quickly tell you that groobies and slank are nouns. They will likely add that frandled is a verb. They may stumble a bit on dorbling and bonkled, but will soon label these as adjectives. (If they do stumble, it’s because these forms, in other positions, could be verbs; they’re aware that those -ing and -ed endings are typical verbal endings.) So how do they know all this? How do they know that groobies and slank are nouns? It’s certainly not because they are “persons, places, things, or even ideas” since these “things” don’t even exist. They know because of the morphology and syntax, because of the suffixes, in this case, on the words (their morphology) and because of the position of the words in relation to the other words (some of which are “real” words) in the rest of the sentence (the syntax). It is that kind of knowledge that we make use of all of the time to identify parts of speech and to learn real new words and how they function.

Move some of those words around and see what happens:

While she was dorbling, she bonkled some slank groobies.

He groobies on the weekends.

Now what part of speech is dorbling or bonkled? Yep, they’re both verbs. We know this because of the morphology (the endings, or the affixes, on the words) and the syntax (the position of the words in relation to the other words). What’s slank here? It’s an adjective, which we know because of its position preceding groobies, which is still a noun. But in the next sentence, groobies is a verb. How do we know? Again, the endings and the position.

So a key lesson here is that we all already know everything we need to know about parts of speech, about the various lexical categories. We just need to make that unconscious knowledge into conscious knowledge. We make use of morphology and syntax constantly. Another important thing to note is that meaning-based definitions (a noun is a person, place, or thing; a verb is an action or state) are very limited and limiting, and can sometimes lead us astray. They can be good starting places, but it’s really the other information that our brain relies on to create the good sentences it creates all the time. So when we start paying attention to morphology and syntax, we’ll see that a whole new linguistic world opens up.

(You can read about doing a version of this with elementary kids in this article .)


If you'd like to print this out, here it is as a doc.