nonnoun

Nonnoun is a term sometimes used in linguistic discussions to describe lexical items that do not constitute nouns in the grammar of a language. The label is not a universal or formal category, but a descriptive convenience for analyses that separate nominal items from other word classes. The scope of what counts as a nonnoun depends on the language and theoretical framework; it often includes adjectives, verbs (when not nominalized), adverbs, prepositions, determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, particles, and interjections. Because many languages allow wide-functional shift, a word may be a noun in some contexts and a nonnoun in others.

Examples of typical nonnouns in English would include adjectives like blue, verbs like eat, adverbs like quickly, prepositions like in, determiners like the, pronouns like she, conjunctions like and, and interjections like oh. Nonnouns may participate in noun phrases as modifiers or function words, but they do not serve as the head of a noun phrase in the same way as nouns typically do. The classification can change with constituency, usage, or grammatical analysis.

In usage, nonnoun is mainly a descriptive label used in typological studies, corpus linguistics, or language documentation to discuss material that does not function as nouns. It is less common in traditional grammar teaching or formal grammars that rely on explicit part-of-speech tagging.

Cross-linguistic notes: some languages have richer noun-like categories or flexible word classes where the boundary between noun and nonnoun is fluid. The concept helps describe such systems by focusing on non-nominal behavior rather than prescribing a fixed set of noun-headed structures. See also noun, part of speech, adjectives, verbs, functional categories.