Nominal (linguistics)

Linguistic category
Nominalization

In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement. Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives. Languages with overt nominal agreement vary in how and to what extent agreement is required.

The history of research on nominals dates back to European studies on Latin and Bantu in which agreement between nouns and adjectives according to the class of the noun can be seen overtly.

Within the study of European languages, recognition of the nominal grouping is reflected in traditional grammar studies based on Latin, which has a highly productive marking system. Nominals can be seen in the shared morphemes that attach to the ends of nouns and adjectives and agree in case and gender. In the example below, 'son' and 'good' agree in nominative case because they are the subject of the sentence and at the same time they agree in gender because the ending is masculine. Likewise, 'the dog' and 'wild' share the same morphemes that show they agree in accusative case and masculine gender. In Latin agreement goes beyond nouns and adjectives. Explanation The good son loves the wild dog. Latin: fīlius bonus amat(1) canem(2) (acc) ferocem(3) (acc). English: [The] son good [he] loves [the] dog wild.

Although much of the research on nominals focuses on their morphological and semantic properties, syntactically nominals can be considered a "super category" which subsumes noun heads and adjective heads. This explains why languages that take overt agreement features have agreement in adjectives and nouns.

Nominal structures are also found in Bantu languages. These languages constitute a sub set of the Niger Congo languages in Africa. There are approximately 250 different varieties of Bantu. Within these languages, nouns have historically been classified into certain groups based on shared characteristics. For example, noun class 1 and 2 represent humans and other animate objects, while noun class 11 represents long thing objects, and abstract nouns. Bantu languages use different combinations of the approximately 24 different Proto Bantu noun classes. The language with the highest number of documented noun classes is Ganda, which utilizes 21 of the 24 noun classes. This ranges all the way to zero, which is the case in Komo D23, whose noun class system has faded out over time. Languages that have approximately six classes paired for singular and plural and about six other classes that are not paired (e. g. infinitive and locative classes) are classified as canonical noun class systems, systems that have many noun classes. These systems are far more typical of Bantu languages than the alternative, reduced noun class systems, such as Komo D23 and other languages that have limited noun classes.