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
Applications: The term can help distinguish person-denoting nouns for parsing and morphological alignment, including languages with
Limitations: The classification overlaps with animacy, gender, and mass/count distinctions; and not all languages mark nounperson
See also: Animacy, Noun phrase, Coreference, Pronoun, Referent.