There are also a few indefinite pronouns: somebody, someone, something, anybody, anyone, anything, nobody, no-one, nothing. These are pronouns since they fulfil the same functions as nouns—or rather, as noun phrases— in sentences. This is illustrated in the following examples:

One kind of word that can be used for referring to ‘things’ is the personal pronoun. Here are a few examples: I will be there in a minute You haven’t got much He is against the proposals Please tell them Show me the method In these examples the pronouns could be replaced by noun phrases, so it is evident that they are functioning in a similar way to noun phrases in
the construction of the whole sentence.

Words like William, London and Snowdon are usually held to be nouns. What is the justification for this? In distribution they are not exactly like common nouns since we cannot normally use determiners with them: a London, this William, etc.

Some affixes are used with great freedom. They are said to be productive. The suffix -ness can be added to a very large number of adjectives to form a noun: obvious, obviousness; friendly, friendliness; fruitful, fruitfulness; cheap, cheapness; and so on. In fact the speaker of English is fairly free to make up new nouns on this model, although he is likely to feel somewhat reluctant to do so if there is an already existing noun with the meaning he desires. For instance, gratefulness and legalness are likely to be thought rather odd words since they are trying to compete
with gratitude and legality.

The lexicon is the technical name for the stock of ready-made items that the language contains. These are not only words, but idiomatic expressions like put down (meaning ‘suppress’) and put out feelers (meaning ‘make tentative inquiries’). The items that make up the lexicon are the lexical stock of the language. Naturally, in the course of history, the lexical stock of a language undergoes many and far-reaching changes.

Reification and classification require the adaptation of old words to new purposes. Our language enables us to adapt words that are not nouns, like resent, into nouns, like resentment, and to combine words like copper and plate to
make new nouns like copperplate.

Words that denote things (including people and other animate beings) and substances are nouns, e.g. house and water. This is not to say that all nouns denote things and substances. Our language encourages us to treat many abstract concepts in the same way as we treat things and substances. Thus we can say three tries and not much patience. But it would surely be circular to say that a try must be a ‘thing’ and that patience must be a ‘substance’ because the words that refer to them are nouns. All we can say is that, in general, the noun is the class of words that is
used to denote things and substances.

From what has been said above, it should be obvious that grammar is a serious discipline. Its subject-matter is a particular field of human social behaviour which, even at a superficial glance, can be seen to be highly complex. It is a specialist field of study which, like law, engineering, dentistry, physics, mathematics, logic and history (among others), has its own aims and methods, and makes use of concepts which are not necessarily those which enable
us to lead our non-specialist everyday lives.

In the remainder of this book, apart from the last chapter, which is about sentences, the chapters are based upon the major word classes of English: noun, verb and adjective. What is often regarded as a fourth major class, the adverb, will be discussed in the chapter on sentences (see pp. 74–7). Major classes, unlike minor ones, contain very large numbers of words, so many that it would hardly be possible to make a complete list of them. When a new word is added to the language, it is added to one of these classes (e.g. hooha, sauna, gungy, skinhead…). Since it takes a time for a new word to become accepted (if indeed it ever is), the total inventory of words must always be somewhat indeterminate. Minor word classes are usually small sets of words with a very definite membership: this, these, that, those form such a set. There is no possibility of adding more words to the list. In fact, these sets can usually be subdivided until we are left with single words that have a unique distribution; there is no other word quite like
this or of.

Many words are used to refer to our experience of the world. They have a denotation. House denotes a kind of object—the sort of thing people live in, with a roof and a door, etc. Cheap denotes a quality, that is, a relation between certain things; in particular, the quality of being easily obtained especially in exchange for money. Eat denotes a dynamic relation between things, a kind of event in which something happens to something. Many everyday words lend themselves fairly easily to the classification of denotations that has been suggested here: objects, qualities and events. Cup,
big and run would fit in very well.