The Timpson Lyceum · Beginning Grammar (2026)

The Noun: Names, Ideas & the Parts of a Sentence – Lesson 2 (Grammar)

Overview

Lesson 1 built up to the sentence and the proposition. This lesson takes the first part of speech in turn — the noun — and then opens up the sentence itself to see what it is made of.

Two ideas run through the whole lesson, and both are easy to nod along to and then quietly forget. The first is that a noun is a word. The old classroom answer, a person, place, or thing, names the wrong kind of item: a noun is not a person, it is the name of one. The second is that a word, the concept it calls to mind, and the thing that concept is true of are three separate levels, and almost every confusion in the lesson comes from sliding between them.

From there the lesson works through the properties a noun can have — common or proper, singular or plural — and the rules for forming plurals, which are the untidiest part of English and mostly a matter of habit rather than reason. It closes with analysis: taking a declarative sentence apart into a subject, a predicate, and the copula that joins them.

Key Concepts

The noun. A noun is a word that is a name. The words boy, girl, city, book, desk all name objects, and a word that names is a noun. It may name a class of things (boy can be applied to any boy) or one particular thing (Michael names one person; Chicago names one place).

• Keep the distinction sharp: a noun is a word, not the thing it names. It names a person; it is not a person.
• Whenever we name something we can see or think about, we are using a noun.

Word, concept, thing. Three things stand apart, and the lesson insists on all three:

• The word — dog, a sign of three letters.
• The concept — whatever notion the word calls to mind: a four-footed domestic animal.
• The thing — the actual animal in the yard.

A child sees a real dog, forms the concept, and then learns the word that names the concept. A word is a sign; it is not the thought itself.

Meaning is fixed by agreement, not by nature. Nothing in the world makes the sounds of dog belong to that animal — speakers simply agree that they do. You cannot look under a rock and find a language; it is something people settle among themselves. Two consequences follow:

• A language can be invented. Agree that a word will stand for a concept, and it does.
• What a word means can change over time. Decimate meant to reduce by a tenth and is now used to mean destroy utterly; take for granted meant to assume something true and is now used to mean fail to be grateful for.

This matters beyond vocabulary. We reason with concepts, not with letters, so to follow an argument you must know which concept a word is carrying. A text written a century ago may use a word that has since shifted, and a rule, law, or regulation written in such words can end up meaning something its authors never asserted. It also opens a rhetorical trick sometimes called a bait and switch: rather than lose an argument about a concept, a speaker quietly points the same word at a different concept. The lesson works through several modern definitions that have been revised in exactly this way, and notes the common pattern — the replacement is almost always vaguer and harder to pin down than what it replaced.

Common and proper nouns.

• A common noun is a name that fits any one of a whole class: boy, city, river, dog.
• A proper noun names one particular person, place, or thing: John, Chicago, the Mississippi.
• The test: does the name fit more than one object? Boy fits every boy, so it is common. John names one boy, so it is proper.
• In writing, a proper noun always begins with a capital letter, as do the words I and O. A common noun begins with a small letter unless it opens a sentence. Capitalisation is how a proper noun is written down, not what makes it proper.

Number. Number is the property of a noun or pronoun that shows whether it stands for one object or more than one. The singular denotes one — fan, book, boy; the plural denotes more than one — fans, books, boys.

Number is a property of the word, not a count of the world:

• Class is singular, yet a class holds many people.
• Scissors is plural, yet it names one object — hence a pair of scissors.

A verb has no number of its own; it agrees with its subject. The bird sings · The birds sing.

Forming plurals. The general rule is to add s. The exceptions are where English gets untidy:

• After s, ss, sh, ch, x, z — add es: church, churches · box, boxes · mass, masses.
• y after a consonant — change y to i, add es: city, cities · lady, ladies.
• y after a vowel — add s: monkey, monkeys · day, days.
• o after a consonant — add es: potato, potatoes · hero, heroes.
• o after a vowel, and musical terms — add s: cameo, cameos · piano, pianos. (Piano has a consonant before the o and ought to take es; musical terms are exempt.)
• f or fe — change to ves: knife, knives · calf, calves · leaf, leaves. Exceptions add s: roof, roofs · chief, chiefs · safe, safes.
• Irregular forms change the word itself: man, men · woman, women · foot, feet · tooth, teeth · goose, geese · mouse, mice · child, children · ox, oxen.
• Same in both numbers: sheep, deer, trout, swine, vermin.
• Letters, figures, and signs take an apostrophe and s: B's, 7's, +'s.
• Compound nouns pluralise the chief word: spoonful, spoonfuls but son-in-law, sons-in-law · passer-by, passers-by.

Abbreviations. An abbreviation is a shortened way of writing a word, with a period marking the shortening. There is little rhyme or reason to their formation — Dr. takes the first and last letters, while No. uses an o that does not appear in number at all — so they are simply learned. Most begin with a capital, and many come from Latin.

• Titles: Dr. · Mr. · Mrs. · Esq. · Rev. · Hon. · Prof.
• Rank and office: Gen. · Gov. · Col. · Maj. · Capt. · Supt. · Atty.
• Places: St. (saint, and also street) · Mt. · Co. · P.O. · R.R. · U.S.
• Time, from Latin: A.M. (before noon) · M. (noon) · P.M. (afternoon) · A.D. (in the year of our Lord) · B.C.
• Notes and commerce: N.B. (take notice) · ult. (last month) · prox. (next month) · No. · lb. · bbl. · C.O.D. · P.S.

Contractions. A contraction joins two words and drops letters, with an apostrophe marking the spot where letters were left out: do not, don't · we are, we're · I have, I've. The difference from an abbreviation is the mark: a period shortens; an apostrophe joins.

The parts of a sentence. A declarative sentence encodes a proposition — it asserts something about something. Three names for the parts of that assertion:

• Subject — that of which something is asserted. In Ice is cold, the subject is ice.
• Predicate — that which is asserted of the subject. In Ice is cold, the predicate is cold.
• Copula — the word that joins the predicate to the subject and makes the assertion. In Ice is cold, the copula is is. Copula means link, and it is usually a form of the verb be: is, was, will be.

Two notes on this:

• Strictly, the subject and predicate are the notions meant, not the words that name them. Unicorns are mythical has a subject even though no unicorn exists — the subject is the notion, and the word is only its sign. Having drawn the distinction, the course sets it aside: from here on, the words themselves are treated as the subject and predicate. Modern grammar has dropped the distinction altogether, and has dropped the copula as a separate part along with it, folding it into the predicate as a linking verb.
• From here on, sentence means declarative sentence unless stated otherwise.

What the predicate can be. The predicate either names a quality the subject possesses — man is mortal; soft, wise, sweet, round, happy — or names a class the subject belongs to — horses are animals. The first kind is an adjective, the second a noun.

Elements and analysis. An element is one distinct part of a sentence. The subject and the predicate are the principal elements: no sentence can be formed without them. Everything else is a subordinate element — with one exception. The copula is not counted as an element at all. It makes the assertion, but it is not one of the parts.

Analysis is the separation of a sentence into its elements. The model used in this course writes the subject, a vertical line, the copula, a colon, and then the predicate:

Indigo | is : blue

Worked Example

Part (a): give the plural, and name the rule.

1. box → boxes. The word ends in x, and after s, ss, sh, ch, x, z we add es.
2. city → cities. The y follows a consonant, so y changes to i and takes es.
3. monkey → monkeys. The y follows a vowel, so it simply takes s.
4. potato → potatoes. The o follows a consonant, so it takes es.
5. piano → pianos. The o follows a consonant and so should take es — but musical terms are the exception, and take s.
6. knife → knives. The fe changes to ves.
7. roof → roofs. An exception to the ves rule; it simply takes s.
8. man → men. Irregular: the word itself changes.
9. deer → deer. Singular and plural are the same.
10. son-in-law → sons-in-law. A compound noun pluralises its chief word, which is son.

Part (b): analyse the sentence.

Name the subject, the copula, and the predicate, then write the diagram. Remember that the copula is not counted among the elements.

1. Gold is precious. — Subject gold; copula is; predicate precious, a quality. Gold | is : precious
2. Whales are mammals. — Subject whales; copula are; predicate mammals, a class. Whales | are : mammals
3. Children should be careful. — Subject children; copula should be; predicate careful, a quality. The copula need not be a single word. Children | should be : careful
4. Robins are birds. — Subject robins; copula are; predicate birds, a class. Robins | are : birds

In each, the two principal elements are the subject and the predicate; the copula asserts the one of the other without being counted as an element itself.

Summary

• A noun is a word that is a name. It names a person, place, or thing, and it is not the person, place, or thing itself.
• The word, the concept it calls to mind, and the thing the concept is true of are three separate levels. A word is a sign for a thought, never the thought.
• The tie between a word and its concept is fixed by agreement, not by nature, which is why meanings drift and why an argument can be derailed by pointing the same word at a different concept.
• A common noun fits any one of a class; a proper noun names one particular thing. The test is whether the name fits more than one object; the capital letter is only how it is written.
• Number is a property of the word, not a count of the world — class is singular, scissors plural. Plurals follow a general rule of adding s, with a long tail of exceptions worth knowing by sight.
• An abbreviation is shortened with a period; a contraction joins two words and marks the gap with an apostrophe.
• A declarative sentence has a subject, a predicate, and a copula that links them and makes the assertion. Subject and predicate are the principal elements; the copula is not an element. Analysis is the separation of a sentence into its elements.