Nouns in DGS are those lexical items that denote a concrete object, a person, an animal, a place, or an abstract entity or concept. From this semantic perspective, nouns in DGS are easy to identify. From a formal perspective, nouns in DGS can be combined with manually and non-manually articulated adjectives as in the examples a), b) and c) [Lexicon 3.4], and with determiners [3.6. Determiners] to form a noun phrase, as can be seen in examples d).
a. house red
‘(a) red house’
b. house big
‘(a) big house’
c. person big
‘(a) big person’
d. house ix3
‘(the) house there / this house’
The order of a manually articulated combination of noun and adjective as well as a combination of determiner and noun within a noun phrase [Syntax 4.] can either be Adj-Noun (respective Det-Noun) or it can be Noun-Adj (respective Noun-Det). Nouns in DGS do not inflect for case or grammatical gender. In the following sub-sections, we differentiate between two types of nouns, i.e. common nouns on the one hand, and proper nouns and sign names on the other hand.