Which tests correctly identify English nouns?

This second chapter about nouns now focusses specifically on the accurate identification of this particular word class. In addition to recognising and using the five functions of nouns as previously described in Chapter 1, any speaker of English that wishes to improve their language to the level required for academia must also be able to quickly and confidently determine a word’s class (whether verb, noun or adjective, for example) for the purposes of editing and proofreading, essay writing and seminar discussions. 

To assist with confident noun identification, it’s important to first realise that any word in the English language may have multiple word classes depending on its form, function, and syntax. The word ‘laugh’, for example, might function as a noun in the expression ‘he’s got a good laugh’ but as a verb in the phrase ‘I never laugh like that’. Because it’s not always clear to the speaker which word belongs to which word class and when, we’ve outlined five tests for you below that should help to more easily and consistently identify nouns.

Test 1: Collocation

One of the most efficient tests of whether a word is a noun is to look at the words surrounding that suspected noun – the words it collocates with. To best achieve this, it’s important to first understand that whether functioning as subjects and objects, nouns are always contained within a larger noun phrase. That is to say that the head noun is the main word of a noun phrase that may or may not contain other pre-modifying or post-modifying word classes. As the following table shows, the most common pre-modifying elements of a noun phrase are often determiners and adjectives, with prepositional phrases and adjective clauses being the most common post-modifying elements: