nounperson

nounperson is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe a subclass of nouns that denote human beings or person-like agents and that can be used referentially within noun phrases. The category is typically contrasted with non-person nouns that name objects, places, or abstract concepts. The primary purpose of labeling nounpersons is to analyze nominal reference, animacy, and agreement patterns across languages, as well as to support corpus annotation and computational tasks such as coreference resolution and pronoun-antecedent tracking.

Etymology and scope: The word is a portmanteau of noun and person. The earliest documented uses are scattered in theoretical discussions and annotation guidelines in the 2000s–2020s; it is not a standard term in all grammars or corpora, and its exact scope varies by project. In some frameworks, nounperson refers to any noun that can denote a human or person-like agent, including occupational roles (teacher, president), kin terms (mother, friend), or generic ethnonyms (doctor). It is distinct from proper names, which are specific identifiers, though some analyses treat proper names as nounpersons when they refer to people.

Applications: The term can help distinguish person-denoting nouns for parsing and morphological alignment, including languages with rich noun class systems or case markings. It supports tasks such as annotating animacy features, improving coreference resolution, and aiding machine-learning models in identifying human referents within text.

Limitations: The classification overlaps with animacy, gender, and mass/count distinctions; and not all languages mark nounperson in the same way. Critics argue that the label can be redundant with existing categories and may oversimplify referential meaning.

See also: Animacy, Noun phrase, Coreference, Pronoun, Referent.