Our indebtedness to Lord Quirk goes further we acknowledge our debt to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Ian Svartvik (Longman, 1985) as a previous large-scale grammar of English from which we have talten inspiration for a project of similar scope. | 242 NOUNS PRONOUNS AND THE SIMPLE NOUN PHRASE The contrast between the types of nouns is not a simple reflection of reality but rather reflects how we choose to conceptualize the entities which we want to talk about. This is particularly clear with nouns which can be either countable or uncountable. 1 Well we ve got an oak out the front conv 2 The daughter had to bring in logs of oak and pine fict f 3 On May 29 a window was broken by a stone news 4 In this flat landscape of scrub and stone there was nowhere one could hide fict Examples 1 and 3 refer to an individual specimen while in 2 and 4 the reference is to oak and stone as material or an undifferentiated mass cf. . Proper nouns need no specification of number and definiteness because they only name instances and do not denote classes compare Sue v. a girl . They are used in situations where the speaker and the addressee know which individual is referred to without any further specification. Nevertheless the borderline between proper nouns and common nouns is not clearcut. for example proper nouns can occur with non-restrictive modifiers cf. The court heard that little Harry s death could have been prevented if social workers had not overruled detectives news Beautiful Di is not so perfect news headline In these examples the modifier does not serve to distinguish Harry or Di from others of that name but rather additionally to characterize a person already uniquely identified. Further proper nouns are sometimes used with possessive determiners I m gonna have to - phone our Sue. conv Oh did I tell you o our Joanie s coming over conv In some cases proper nouns can be used as common nouns . a Ford - . In going through the characteristics of some important noun classes we will repeatedly come back to the remarkable flexibility of nouns. Use of countable nouns in Text samples If we inspect Text samples 1-4 again we find large numbers of countable nouns. They denote for example .
