This book is intended as an aid in self-study or as supplementary material in regular language classes. Its purpose is to review and codify for the intermediate to advanced student of English the main facts about English nouns - their form and their syntax. Nouns are one of the two most numerous classes of words in the English language, the other being verbs. Their main role, of course, is to name things - objects, people, animals, places, substances, and all the rest. As such, their number is as great as the number of such things that speakers want to talk about. Nouns, therefore are a very "productive" word class; new ones are readily coined, and old ones become obsolete and pass away. For this reason, the student must not expect to find any "key" to the meaning of English nouns in this book. Their number is much too vast for that.
The grammar of nouns - their forms and the ways they are used in sentences - can be presented, however. The first lessons in this book deal with the various kinds of nouns and their forms. Then we present the personal pronouns, which modern grammarians usually treat as a special subclass of nouns rather than as a separate "part of speech." Next comes the category called "substitute nouns" - words like other, one, this, few, some - which have traditionally been called pronouns but which are really about halfway between pronouns and nouns. Like pronouns, they acquire their referential meaning from an antecedent noun; like nouns, they can be preceded in many cases by noun-determiners, adjectives, possessives, and other modifiers, and many of them can also be inflected. At this point we present the matter of the "echoing" of nouns and noun constructions by pronouns and other substitute expressions.
The syntax of nouns is presented in the next few lessons, and these are followed by a study of noun clauses, noun compounds, noun-forming derivational suffixes, and, finally, certain structures that are not nouns but which behave like nouns in sentences.
Each lesson consists of an expository section, with examples, followed by drills and exercises of various types. Answers to the exercises, when the latter are such that "right" answers exist, are given at the end of the book.
We cannot, of course, make any claim to have presented "English nouns" in this book, or even a reasonable sampling of them. We have, however, made an effort to include all the function words that work with nouns and are so crucial in understanding the meaning of English sentences. The student can easily learn the referential meaning of a noun that is unfamiliar to him; what he may not be able to find readily in ordinary reference books is the meaning of the structure in which it is used. For a more thoroughgoing study of noun modifiers, the student should consult The Key to English Adjectives 1 and 2; for word study and vocabulary building, The Key to English Vocabulary; and, for idioms not mentioned in this book, The Key to English Figurative Expressions.
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