Love, hate, admiration, friendship, jealousy… "These are feelings" - you will say and you will be absolutely right. But there is something else: all these words denote states, concepts that cannot be reached, touched and cannot be counted. In other words, these are abstract (or abstract) nouns.
Language
What is language? We open the reference book "Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary" and find out that this is the main socially significant form that helps a person to reflect the reality around him and himself and assists both in storing established and in obtaining new knowledge about reality. You could say it's a global mechanism. What is the role of the noun in it? It is undoubtedly a part of it - a unique, irreplaceable, integral element of a living, most complex device. And if you look even deeper, then the abstract noun plays an equally important role. Which one - we will talk about this further.
Concrete and abstractnouns
Each word has its own meaning. Based on the features of the expressed meaning, nouns are divided into the following lexical and grammatical categories: concrete, abstract, collective and real.
Specific nouns include words denoting objects or phenomena that exist in reality: a house, a dog, a hammer, a chair, a tiger, and so on. They have both singular and plural forms.
Abstract (or abstract) nouns are words that mean such non-material concepts as states, feelings, qualities, properties, actions. Their semantics presupposes the absence of an idea of the score. Thus, they are used only in the singular. For example: joy, beauty, reading, perseverance, endurance. As a rule, an abstract noun is formed using the suffixes -k-, -izn-, -in-, -tiy-, -niy-, -stv-, -atst-, -ost-, -from- and others.
Other ranks
Collective nouns are lexical units denoting a set of objects, persons, as something indivisible, a whole: foliage, relatives, youth, dishes, furniture, etc. They also do not change in numbers and do not combine with cardinal numbers.
And the last thing - real nouns that denote substances that are homogeneous in composition, in mass, and even if divided into parts, retain the properties of the whole. Usually they cannot be counted. Just measure. For example: beef, water, dough, sour cream and others. Accordingly, they are notchange by numbers, not used with cardinal numbers.
Language level
We continue our discussion about the role of abstract nouns in the language, in reflecting reality. Many linguists 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 rank appears exceptional and is opposed to the other three.
For example, the language level has already been mentioned above. In this plane, concrete nouns are opposed to abstract, material and collective ones, since only they name 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, let's turn to the philosophical level of reflection of reality, since this is where its undivided reign begins.
Philosophy
At the philosophical level of reflection of reality, all existing objects are divided into ideal and material. Accordingly, an abstract noun, which names ideal, abstract objects, stands on the opposite side of concrete, real and collective names. After all, this trinity denotes for the most part something material and sensually perceived.
Consequently, abstract nouns (examples follow) are a unique category, the exclusivity of which lies in the fact that only it gives a name to such intangible substances as: 1) an abstract property, a sign of an object (ease of flight, running, being, bags); 2) abstract behavior, action, activity (acquisition of a father, teacher, scientist; acquisition of a house, book, real estate); 3) abstract mood, feeling, state that appear in different situations (hatred of the enemy, the world, friend; stagnation in relationships, in the country, in work); 4) something speculative, spiritual, which exists only in the human mind and cannot be visualized (unscrupulousness, justice, spirituality).
