3.1.1. Common nouns
Common nouns in LSC may be concrete or abstract. For instance, the sign house is a concrete noun and the sign idea is an abstract noun.
a) house
b) idea
Moreover, nouns may be categorized as countable or non-countable (count nouns and mass nouns, respectively). The signs house and idea are countable nouns because they can combine with numerals (a-d) and express plurality by reduplication of the sign (a, c). It is worthy to highlight that when the numeral accompanies a countable noun it is possible that the noun may not be reduplicated to express the plural, and the numeral seems to be enough to express the plurality of the noun (b, d).
a) ix3 house+++ three.
‘He/she has three houses.’
b) ix3 house three.
‘He/she has three houses.’
c) ix1 idea++ two.
‘Yesterday I had two ideas.’
d) ix1 idea two.
‘Yesterday I had two ideas.’
However, other nouns do not admit combination with numerals or pluralization by repetition of the sign. Consider the signs rice and water. Both are mass nouns, since they do not have a plural form. This type of signs combines mainly with classifier constructions in order to express quantification. In the example below the sign water is combined with a classifier that represents a bathtub full of water in order to express that there was a big amount of water in the bathtub.
bathtub water a_lot cl: ‘a lot of water’.
‘The bathtub is full of water.’
Since LSC does not have copular verbs, nouns may be found in nominal predicates like the one exemplified below [SYNTAX 2.1.4.1].
gemma person professor.
‘Gemma is a professor.’
Some signs are easy to classify as nouns, especially when they refer to a specific object (like house), since they do not fit in any other category. However, in LSC other signs can be difficult to categorize. For example, the sign job is very commonly used as a verb (‘to work’) and the same happens with many other noun-verb pairs. The phonological form of these pairs is identical, and the only way to know if we are dealing with a noun or a verb is by looking at the syntactic distribution in the sentence, the mouth patterns and sometimes the path movement that differs from the noun and the verb [see MORPHOLOGY 2.1.2.1 for further discussion on this topic].
a) job/work
b) airplane/fly