Love, hate, admiration, friendship, jealousy ... "These are feelings," you say, and you will be absolutely right. But there is one more thing: all these words indicate conditions, concepts that cannot be reached, touched and which cannot be counted. In other words, these are abstract (or abstract) nouns.
Tongue
What is a language? We open the directory “Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary” and find out that this is the main socially significant form that helps a person to reflect the reality surrounding him and himself and helps both to keep settled and to gain new knowledge about reality. It can be said a global mechanism. What is the role of a noun in it ? Undoubtedly, it is part of it - a unique, indispensable, inalienable element of a living, complex device. And if you look even deeper, the abstract noun plays an equally important role. Which one - we will talk about this further.
Concrete and Abstract Nouns
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 material.
Concrete 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 take the form of both singular and plural.
Abstract (or abstract) nouns are words meaning such intangible concepts as states, feelings, qualities, properties, actions. Their semantics implies a lack of understanding 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-, -azt-, -ost-, -ot- and others.
Other categories
Collective nouns are lexical units that designate the totality of objects, persons, as something indivisible, the whole: foliage, relatives, youth, dishes, furniture, etc. They also do not change in numbers and are not combined with quantitative numerals.
And the last - material nouns, which mean substances that are homogeneous in composition, mass, and even if they are divided into parts, retain the properties of the whole. Usually they cannot be counted. Just measure it. For example: beef, water, dough, sour cream and others. Accordingly, they do not vary in numbers, are not used with quantitative numbers.
Language level
We continue our discussion of the role of abstract nouns in language, in the reflection of reality. Many linguistic scholars believe that the four categories of nouns listed above are, in fact, the four levels of reflection of reality in a language: linguistic, philosophical, natural science and cognitive. On each of them, only one category is exceptional and is opposed to the other three.
For example, the language level has already been said above. In this plane, concrete nouns are opposed to abstract, material, and collective, since only they call 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, we turn to the philosophical level of reflection of reality, since it is here that its undivided reign begins.
Philosophy
At the philosophical level of reflection of reality, all existing objects are divided into ideal and material. Accordingly, the abstract noun, which calls ideal, abstract objects, stands on the opposite side from the names of concrete, material and collective. After all, this trinity means for the most part something material and sensually perceived.
Therefore, abstract nouns (examples follow) are a unique category, the exclusiveness of which lies in the fact that only he gives a name to such intangible substances as: 1) an abstract property, an attribute of an object (ease of flight, running, being, bag); 2) abstract behavior, action, activity (acquisition of father, teacher, scientist; acquisition of home, books, real estate); 3) an abstract mood, feeling, condition that appears in different situations (hatred of the enemy, the world, friend; stagnation in relations, in the country, at work); 4) something speculative, spiritual, which exists only in the consciousness of man and it is impossible to visualize it (unprincipledness, justice, spirituality).