Abstract noun and its role in language

Love, hate, admiration, friendship, jealousy ... "These are feelings," you will say and will be absolutely right. But there is something else: all these words denote states, concepts, to which it is impossible to reach, touch, and which can not be counted. In other words, these are abstract (or abstract) nouns.

Language

What is language? We open the handbook "Linguistic Encyclopaedic Dictionary" and learn that this is the main socially significant form that helps a person to reflect the surrounding reality and himself and helps both in keeping the established and in obtaining new knowledge about reality. You can say a global mechanism. What is the role of the noun in it ? It is undoubtedly its part - a unique, indispensable, inalienable element of a living, complex device. And if you look even deeper, then an abstract noun plays an equally important role. Which is exactly what we are talking about next.

Specific and abstract nouns

Every word has its own meaning. Proceeding from the peculiarities of the expressed meaning, nouns are divided into the following lexical and grammatical categories: concrete, abstract, collective and material.

Specific nouns include words denoting objects or phenomena existing in reality: a house, a dog, a hammer, a chair, a tiger, and so on. They have the form of both singular and plural.

Abstract (or abstract) nouns are words that mean such intangible concepts as states, feelings, qualities, properties, actions. Their semantics implies a lack of understanding of the account. Thus, they are used only in the singular. For example: joy, beauty, reading, perseverance, endurance. As a rule, an abstract noun is formed with the suffixes -k-, -ins-, -in-, -ti-, -ny-, -st-, -ac-, -ost-, -ot- and others.

Other categories

Collective nouns are lexical units that denote the totality of objects, persons, as something indivisible, the whole: foliage, relatives, youth, utensils, furniture, etc. They also do not change in numbers and are not combined with quantitative numerals.

And the last - real nouns, which mean substances that are homogeneous in composition, by mass, and even if they are divided into parts, they retain the properties of the whole. Usually they can not be counted. Only measure. For example: beef, water, dough, sour cream and others. Accordingly, they do not change in numbers, they are not used with quantitative numbers.

Language level

We continue the discussion on the role of abstract nouns in the language, in the reflection of reality. Many linguistic scholars believe that the four categories of nouns listed above are, in fact, four levels of reflection of reality in the language: linguistic, philosophical, natural-science and cognitive. On each of them, only one category is considered exceptional and contrasted with the other three.

For example, the language level has already been mentioned above. In this plane, the concrete nouns are contrasted with the abstract, the material and the collective, because only they call the countable objects and are freely used both in the singular and in the plural. The rest are uncountable objects.

But since this article describes an abstract noun, we turn to the philosophical level of reflection of reality, since it is here that his undivided reign begins.

Philosophy

At the philosophical level of reflecting reality, all existing objects are divided into ideal and material. Accordingly, the abstract noun, which calls the ideal, abstract objects, stands on the opposite side of the names of concrete, material and collective. After all, this trio denotes in the main mass something material and sensible.

Consequently, abstract nouns (examples follow) are a unique category, the exclusivity of which consists in the fact that only it gives a name to such intangible substances as: 1) the abstract property, the feature of the object (lightness of flight, running, being, bag); 2) abstract behavior, action, activity (acquiring a father, teacher, scientist, buying a house, a book, real estate); 3) abstract mood, feeling, condition, appearing in different situations (hatred for the enemy, for peace, for a friend, stagnation in relations, in the country, in work); 4) something speculative, spiritual, which exists only in the mind of man and it is impossible to imagine it visually (unprincipled, fair, spiritual).