Names are examples of words. common noun

Nouns are divided into proper and common nouns according to their meaning. The very definitions of this part of speech have Old Slavonic roots.

The term "common" comes from "reprimand", "reproach", and is used for the general name of homogeneous, similar objects and phenomena, and "own" means "feature", an individual person or a single object. This naming distinguishes it from other objects of the same type.

For example, the common word "river" defines all rivers, but the Dnieper, Yenisei are proper names. These are constant grammatical features of nouns.

What are proper names in Russian

A proper name is an exclusive name for an object, phenomenon, person, different from others, standing out from other multiple concepts.

These are the names and nicknames of people, the names of countries, cities, rivers, seas, astronomical objects, historical events, holidays, books and magazines, animal names.

Also, ships, enterprises, various institutions, product brands and much more that require a special name can have their own names. May consist of one or more words.

Spelling is determined by the following rule: all proper names are capitalized. For example: Vanya, Morozko, Moscow, Volga, Kremlin, Russia, Russia, Christmas, Battle of Kulikovo.

Names that have a conditional or symbolic meaning are enclosed in quotation marks. These are the names of books and various publications, organizations, firms, events, etc.

Compare: Big theater, but the Sovremennik theater, the Don River and the Quiet Don novel, the play Thunderstorm, the Pravda newspaper, the Admiral Nakhimov motor ship, the Lokomotiv stadium, the Bolshevichka factory, the Mikhailovskoye Museum-Reserve.

Note: the same words, depending on the context, are common or proper and are written according to the rules. Compare: bright sun and star Sun, native earth and planet Earth.

Proper names, consisting of several words and denoting a single concept, are underlined as one member of the sentence.

Let's look at an example: Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov wrote a poem that made him famous. So, in this sentence, the subject will be three words (first name, patronymic and last name).

Types and examples of proper nouns

Proper names are studied by the linguistic science of onomastics. This term is derived from the ancient Greek word and means "the art of giving names"

This area of ​​linguistics deals with the study of information about the name of a specific, individual object and identifies several types of names.

Anthroponyms are called proper names and surnames of historical figures, folklore or literary characters, famous and ordinary people, their nicknames or pseudonyms. For example: Abram Petrovich Hannibal, Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, Lefty, Judas, Koschey the Immortal.

Toponyms study the appearance of geographical names, names of cities, streets, which may reflect the specifics of the landscape, historical events, religious motifs, lexical features of the indigenous population, and economic signs. For example: Rostov-on-Don, Kulikovo field, Sergiev Posad, Magnitogorsk, Strait of Magellan, Yaroslavl, Black Sea, Volkhonka, Red Square, etc.

Astronyms and cosmonyms analyze the appearance of the names of celestial bodies, constellations, galaxies. Examples: Earth, Mars, Venus, Halley's Comet, Stozhary, Ursa Major, Milky Way.

There are other sections in onomastics that study the names of deities and mythological heroes, the names of nationalities, the names of animals, etc., helping to understand their origin.

Common noun - what is it

These nouns name any concept from a set of similar ones. They have a lexical meaning, that is, informativeness, in contrast to proper names, which do not have such a property and only name, but do not express the concept, do not reveal its properties.

The name doesn't tell us anything Sasha, it only identifies a particular person. In the phrase girl Sasha, we learn the age and gender.

Common noun examples

Common names are all the realities of the world around us. These are words expressing specific concepts: people, animals, natural phenomena, objects, etc.

Examples: doctor, student, dog, sparrow, thunderstorm, tree, bus, cactus.

Can denote abstract entities, qualities, states or characteristics:courage, understanding, fear, danger, peace, power.

How to define a proper or common noun

A common noun can be distinguished by meaning, because it names an object or phenomenon related to homogeneous, and a grammatical feature, because it can change by numbers ( year - years, man - people, cat - cats).

But many nouns (collective, abstract, real) do not have a plural form ( childhood, darkness, oil, inspiration) or the only one ( frosts, weekdays, darkness). Common nouns are written with a small letter.

Proper nouns are the distinctive name of single objects. They can only be used in the singular or plural ( Moscow, Cheryomushki, Baikal, Catherine II).

But if they call different persons or objects, they can be used in the plural ( Ivanov family, both Americas). Capitalized, enclosed in quotation marks if necessary.

Its useful to note: between proper and common names there is a constant exchange, they tend to move into the opposite category. common words Faith Hope Love became proper names in Russian.

Many borrowed names were also originally common nouns. For example, Peter - "stone" (Greek), Victor - "winner" (Lat.), Sophia - "wisdom" (Greek).

Often in history, proper names become common nouns: bully (English Houlihan family with a bad reputation), volt (physicist Alessandro Volta), colt (inventor Samuel Colt). Literary characters can acquire a common noun: donquixote, Judas, plushkin.

Toponyms have given names to many objects. For example: cashmere fabric (Kashmir Valley of Hindustan), cognac (province in France). At the same time, an animate proper name becomes an inanimate common noun.

And vice versa, it happens that generic concepts become uncommon: Lefty, cat Fluff, signor Tomato.

There is a huge variety of phenomena in the world. For each of them in the language there is a name. If it names a whole group of objects, then such a word is. When there is a need to name one object from a number of homogeneous ones, then the language has its own names for this.

nouns

Common nouns are such nouns that immediately designate a whole class of objects united by some common features. For example:

• Each water stream can be called in one word - a river.
• Any plant with a trunk and branches is a tree.
• All animals of gray color, large size, with a trunk instead of a nose are called elephants.
• Giraffe - any animal with a long neck, small horns and high growth.

Proper names are nouns that distinguish one object from the entire class of similar phenomena. For example:

• The dog's name is Buddy.
• My cat's name is Murka.
• This river is the Volga.
• The deepest lake is Baikal.

When we know what our own name is, we can perform the following task.

Practice #1

Which nouns are proper nouns?

Moscow; city; Earth; planet; bug; dog; Vlad; boy; radio station; "Lighthouse".

Capital letter in proper nouns

As can be seen from the first task, proper names, unlike common nouns, are written with a capital letter. Sometimes it happens that the same word is written first with a small letter, then with a capital one:

• bird eagle, the city of Oryol, the ship "Eagle";
• strong love, girl Love;
• early spring, lotion "Spring";
• riverside willow, restaurant "Iva".

If you know what your own name is, then it’s easy to understand the reason for this phenomenon: words denoting single objects are capitalized in order to separate them from others of the same kind.

Quotation marks for own names

In order to know how to correctly use quotation marks in your own names, you need to learn the following: proper names denoting phenomena in the world created by human hands are isolated. In this case, quotation marks act as isolation marks:

• newspaper "New World";
• do-it-yourself magazine;
• factory "Amta";
• hotel "Astoria";
• ship "Swift".

The transition of words from common nouns to proper ones and vice versa

It cannot be said that the distinction between the categories of proper names and common nouns is unshakable. Sometimes common nouns become proper names. We talked about the rules for writing them above. What are your own names? Examples of transition from the category of common nouns:

• cream "Spring";
• perfume "Jasmine";
• cinema "Zarya";
• magazine "Worker".

Proper names also easily become generalized names of homogeneous phenomena. Below are our own names, which can already be called common nouns:

• These are my young don Juan!
• We aim at Newtons, but we don’t know the formulas ourselves;
• You are all Pushkins until you write the dictation.

Practice #2

Which sentences contain proper nouns?

1. We decided to meet at the "Ocean".

2. In the summer I swam in the real ocean.

3. Anton decided to give his beloved the perfume "Rose".

4. The rose was cut in the morning.

5. We are all Socrates in our kitchen.

6. This idea was first put forward by Socrates.

Classification of proper names

It would seem that it is easy to learn what a proper name is, but you still need to repeat the main thing - proper names are assigned to one object from a whole series. It is advisable to classify the following series of phenomena:

The names of people, surnames, patronymics, nicknames of animals are animate nouns, and geographical names and designations of everything created by man are inanimate. This is how their own names are characterized from the point of view of the category of animation.

Proper names in the plural

It is necessary to dwell on one point, which is due to the semantics of the studied features of proper names in that they are rarely used in the plural. You can use them to refer to multiple items as long as they have the same proper name:

The surname can be used in the plural. number in two cases. First, if it denotes a family, people who are related:

• It was customary for the Ivanovs to gather for dinner with the whole family.
• The Karenins lived in St. Petersburg.
• The Zhurbin dynasty had at all a hundred years of experience at a metallurgical plant.

Secondly, if namesakes are called:

• Hundreds of Ivanovs can be found in the register.
• They are my full namesakes: Grigoriev Alexandra.

- inconsistent definitions

One of the tasks of the Unified State Examination in the Russian language requires knowledge of what your own name is. Graduates are required to establish correspondences between sentences and those allowed in them. One of these is a violation in the construction of a sentence with an inconsistent application. The fact is that the proper name, which is an inconsistent application, does not change in cases with the main word. Examples of such sentences with grammatical errors are given below:

• Lermontov was not enthusiastic about his poem "The Demon" (the poem "The Demon").
• Dostoevsky described the spiritual crisis of his time in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov" (in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov").
• A lot is said and written about the film "Taras Bulba" (About the film "Taras Bulba").

If a proper name acts as an addition, that is, in the absence of a defined word, then it can change its form:

• Lermontov was not enthusiastic about his "Demon".
• Dostoevsky described the spiritual crisis of his time in The Brothers Karamazov.
• A lot is said and written about Taras Bulba.

Practice #3

Which sentences have errors?

1. We stood for a long time at the painting "Barge Haulers on the Volga".

2. In The Hero of His Time, Lermontov sought to uncover the problems of his era.

3. In the "Journal of Pechorin" the vices of a secular person are revealed.

4). The story "Maxim Maksimych" reveals the image of a beautiful person.

5. In his opera The Snow Maiden, Rimsky-Korsakov sang love as the highest ideal of mankind.

He has a simple definition. In fact, a common noun is a word that denotes people, animals, objects, abstract ideas and concepts. They do not include words meaning names of people, names of places, countries, cities, etc. These nouns are of the type of proper names.

Thus, the country is a common noun, and Russia is a proper name. Puma is the name of a wild animal, and in this case the noun puma is a common noun. And as the name of a well-known company that produces sportswear and shoes, Puma is a proper name.

Back in the first half of the last century, the word "apple" was unthinkable in the use of a proper name. It was used in its original meaning: that is, an apple, a fruit, the fruit of an apple tree. Now Apple is both a proper noun and a common noun.

This happened after an unsuccessful three-month search by partners for a suitable name for the company, when, in desperation, the founder of the company, Steve Jobs, decided to name it after his favorite fruit. The name has become a truly iconic American brand that produces tablet computers, phones, software.

Picking up examples of common names is not difficult. Let's start with the household items around us. Imagine you wake up in the morning. What do you see when you open your eyes? Of course, an alarm clock. An alarm clock is an object that wakes us up in the morning, and from a linguistic point of view, it is a common noun. Leaving the house, you meet a neighbor. There are many hurrying people on the street. You notice that the sky has frowned. Get on the bus and go to the office. Neighbor, people, sky, office, bus, street - common nouns

Common noun types

In Russian, the common noun is divided into 4 main types:

1. Specific concepts (people, animals, objects, plants). These are the designations of objects / persons in the singular: student, neighbor, classmate, seller, driver, cat, cougar, house, table, apple. Such nouns can be combined with
2. abstract concepts. It is a type of nouns with abstract meaning. They can denote phenomena, scientific concepts, characteristics, state, quality: peace, war, friendship, suspicion, danger, kindness, relativity.
3. Real nouns. As the name implies, these nouns denote substances, substances. These may include medicinal products, foodstuffs, chemical elements, building materials, coal, oil, oil, aspirin, flour, sand, oxygen, silver.
4. Collective nouns. These nouns are a collection of persons or objects that are in unity and belong to a certain conceptual category: midges, infantry, foliage, relatives, youth, people. Such nouns are usually used in the singular. Often combined with the words a lot (a little), a little: a lot of midges, few youth. Some of them can be used in the people - peoples.

From school time, we remember how a proper name differs from a common noun: the first is written with a capital letter! Masha, Rostov, Leo Tolstoy, Polkan, Danube - compare with a girl, city, count, dog, river. And only this? Perhaps, to figure it out, you will need the help of Rosenthal.

Proper name- a noun indicating a specific object, person, animal, object in order to distinguish them from a number of homogeneous

Common noun- a noun that names a class, type, category of an object, action or state, not taking into account their individuality.

These categories of nouns are usually studied in the 5th grade, and schoolchildren remember once and for all that the difference between a proper name and a common noun is in an uppercase or lowercase letter at the beginning. For the majority, it is enough to understand that names, surnames, nicknames, names of topographic and astronomical objects, unique phenomena, as well as objects and objects of culture (including literary works) belong to their own. All the rest are common nouns, and there are much more of the latter.

Comparison

Proper names are always secondary and secondary, and not every object or object requires their presence. For example, naming natural phenomena, with the exception of typhoons and hurricanes of enormous destructive power, is not accepted and is useless. You can describe, concretize your instructions in different ways. So, speaking about a neighbor, you can give his name, or you can give a description: a teacher, in a red jacket, lives in apartment number 7, an athlete. It becomes clear what we are talking about. However, only proper nouns can uniquely define individuality (there can be many teachers and athletes nearby, but Arkady Petrovich is alone), and their relationship with the object is closer. Common nouns denote concepts or categories.

Proper names are most often random, not connected in any way with the characteristics of the object, and if they are related (Slyuk's cat, Bystrinka river), then it is very ambiguous: both a cat can turn out to be good-natured, and a river can be slow-flowing. Common nouns name and describe the subject, these nouns necessarily carry lexical information.

Only animate and inanimate objects that have significance for a person and need a personal approach are called proper names. So, an average person sees stars at night, and an amateur astronomer, for example, sees the constellation Taurus; for the Minister of Education, schoolchildren are just schoolchildren, and for the class teacher 3 "B" - Vasya Petrov, Petya Vasechkin, Masha Startseva.

We have already determined what is the difference between a proper name and a common noun in terms of semantics. Grammatically, they can be distinguished using the plural form: the first ones are not used in such a form (Moscow, Lev Nikolaevich, dog Sharik). An exception is made for geographical names that do not have a singular number (Velikie Luki), as well as in the case of combining persons by kinship or belonging to a homogeneous group (the Karamazov brothers; all Peters are now birthdays; there are many Ivanovkas in Russia).

When processing foreign texts, proper names are not translated, they are written either in practical transcription (preserving phonetics and as close as possible to the original), or in transliteration (the word is transferred character by character in accordance with international rules).

And, of course, lowercase letters for common nouns, uppercase letters for proper nouns. Have we already talked about this?

) a whole group of objects that have common features, and naming these objects according to their belonging to this category: article, house, a computer etc.

An extensive group of common names are terms of a scientific and technical nature, including terms of physical geography, toponymy, linguistics, art, etc. If the spelling sign of all proper names is their spelling with a capital letter, then common nouns are written with a lowercase letter.

The transition of the onym to appellative without affixation in linguistics is called appeal (deonymization) . For example:

• (English Charles Boycott → English to boycott);
• peninsula Labrador → labrador (stone);
• Newfoundland → Newfoundland (dog breed) .

The transition of a common name to a proper name may be accompanied by the loss of its former meaning, for example:

• right hand (from other Russian. desn "right") → river "Desna". The Desna is a left tributary of the Dnieper.
• Velikaya → river Velikaya (a small river in the Russian North).

A common noun can denote not only a category of objects, but also any individual object within this category. The latter happens when:

1. The individual characteristics of the subject do not matter. For example: " If the dog is not teased, it will not bite."- the word" dog "refers to any dog, and not to any particular one.
2. In the described situation, only one item of this category. For example: " Meet me at the corner at noon”- the interlocutors know which corner will serve as a meeting point.
3. Individual attributes of an object are described by additional definitions. For example: " I remember the day I first set sail» - a specific day stands out among other days.

The boundary between common nouns and proper names is not unshakable: common nouns can turn into proper names in the form of names and nicknames ( onymization), and proper names - into common nouns ( deonymization).

Onimization(transition appellative in onym):

1. kalita (bag) → Ivan Kalita;

Deonymization. The following types of such transitions are noted:

1. person's name → person; Pechora (river) → Pechora (city)
2. person's name → thing: Kravchuk → kravchuchka, Colt → colt;
3. place name → item: Kashmir → cashmere (fabric);
4. person's name → action: Boycott → boycott;
5. place name → action: Earth → land;
6. person's name → unit of measurement: Ampere → ampere , Henry → henry , Newton → newton ;

Proper names, which have become common nouns, are called eponyms, sometimes they are used in a playful sense (for example " Aesculapius" - a doctor, "Schumacher" - a lover of fast driving, etc.).

A vivid example of the transformation before our eyes own name in eponym is the word kravchuchka - the name of a handcart, widespread in Ukraine, named after the 1st president Leonid Kravchuk, during whose reign the shuttle business became widespread, and the word kravchuchka in everyday life, it practically supplanted other names for a handcart.