Common Noun

A Common Noun is a Lexical Noun that Denotes a Semantic Class or one or its Members.

• AKA: Collective Noun, Class Noun.
• Context:
  • It can be:
    • a Singular Common Noun;
    • a Plural Common Noun.
  • It can be a Countable Noun, a Mass Noun, or a Collective Noun.
  • It can receive the tag NN (Singular Common Noun) or NNS (Plural Common Noun) in the Penn Treebank Format.
  • It can be described in a Dictionary or Lexical Database.
  • It can be a Hypernym.
  • It can be the Head Word to a Nominal Mention.
  • It can have an Upper Case First Letter if it begins a Sentence.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • Singular Common Noun: carrier cabbage knuckle-duster Casino afghan shed thermostat investment slide humour falloff slick wind hyena override subhumanity machinist ...
  • Plural Common Noun: undergraduates scotches bric-a-brac products bodyguards facets coasts divestitures storehouses designs clubs fragrances averages subjectivists apprehensions muses factory-jobs ...
  • “son-in-law” and “sons-in-law” are Compound Noun.
  • “geese” and "gaggle” are Collective Nouns.
  • “gravel” and “furniture” are Mass Nouns.
  • “egg” and “son-in-law” are Countable Nouns.
  • “relational data”, “algorithm”, a Technical Term that refers to a Class.
  • Found in many Natural Languages:
    • Body parts and functions: hair, head, eye, cheek, tongue, live, die, breath, cough, urine, tear, pus.
    • Kinship terms: mother, uncle, aunt, daughter-in-law, son-in-law.
    • Basic natural world entities: river, lake, water, sun, lightning, root.
    • Elementary technology: fire, needle, drill, bow, arrow, glue, rope.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Concrete Noun, such as “Michael Jackson”, or “Bernoulli Trial”.
• See: Nominal Mention, Subsumption Relation.

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References

2009

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=common%20noun
  • S: (n) common noun (a noun that denotes any or all members of a class)
• Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/common_noun
  • 1. A noun that can be preceded by an indefinite article, and denotes any member, or all members of a class; an ordinary noun such as "dog" or "city."
  • 2. An uncapitalized noun.
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_noun#Proper_nouns_and_common_nouns
  • Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter or Johnny), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet or person).
  • Sometimes the same word can function as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special. For example the common noun god denotes all deities, while the proper noun God references the monotheistic God specifically.
• ACE Benchmark Task.
  • Nominal mentions: The mention is a noun phrase whose head is a common noun

1975

• (Woods, 1975)

2006

• (Miller & Hristea, 2006)

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