The individual noun serves to name a subject or element that can be counted and individualized.
Individual noun is a word that describes a single element, animal or individual, in all cases in a general way. This resource, widely used on a daily basis, both in spoken and written language, is also known as an individual name, since it is intended to identify something countable within a set or grouping of items.
An individual noun can refer to a real or fictitious creature and differs from the collective noun because the former, without exception, points to an object or being that can be individualized and counted. Individual nouns determine a unit that is sometimes presented in the singular and, in others, in the plural. In practice, it is accepted as an individual noun, for example, “one inhabitant” or “five inhabitants” but, if we appeal to the concept of population, the category of collective noun comes into play because it is not possible to count or establish how many beings are included.
It is worth remembering that each noun , regardless of what type it is, has an essential and important role within the field of grammar because it enriches a language by giving clarity and precision to the language. In general, there are linguistic resources and rhetorical figures that complement, embellish, emphasize and accompany it, being able to discover in a phrase, statement or sentence from an apposition to a pleonasm or a redundancy , for example.
Characteristics of individual nouns
There are characteristics of individual nouns that make them very different from all other classes of nouns . In addition to the differences mentioned above in relation to collective nouns , experts in the field point out that no individual noun , even if cited in the plural, has the ability to replace a collective noun or function like it.
On the other hand, the proper noun , the common noun , the concrete noun and the abstract noun come into play. Although, like the individual, the proper noun names a unit, the latter is written in capital letters and gives the specific name of a place, animal, company or subject. They are proper nouns , therefore, Nicaragua , Germán and Nestlé .
Of the common noun, the theory says that it serves to recognize the same category of something by pointing to a group of elements that share a species or traits. Under the topic “family” , to propose a possibility, mom, dad, cousin, nephew, grandmother, uncle, etc. emerge as common nouns.
Among the enormous variety of nouns that nourish the Spanish language, individual nouns appear.
The concrete noun , which is used to account for the existence of specific items that can be appreciated with the senses, can be included in the category of individual noun. Frog , accordion , pear and table are concrete nouns . Very different from them are abstract nouns because they are reserved for the mention of intangible, immaterial issues: such are justice, sadness, anger, solidarity...
Nor should we lose sight of the information provided by linguistic morphology in terms of structures, variants and links. In Spanish , for example, grammatical gender is applied to more than one pronoun , article , adjective and noun because agreement must be guaranteed in every statement taking into account whether something is expressed in feminine, masculine or, in certain languages , in neuter. . The correct thing is to express yourself in the following ways: “The fish…” or “The apple” , the forms “The fish” and “The apple” being incorrect. The grammatical number is also essential when specifying whether it is plural or singular: “The fish” (not “The fish” or “The fish” ) and “The apple” (not “The apples” or “The apple” ” ).
Cat and dog are individual nouns that are present in both literal and figurative language.
Individual names in different styles and registers
Individual names can be applied in different styles and registers, and it is possible to find them in either the subject or the predicate .
In colloquial language, an informal and spontaneous style is allowed, often using a single word or expression ( "Man!" ) or some interjection ( "Bravo! My favorite player broke a new record" ) or ellipses ( "The girl “He ate flan and the father had ice cream” ) which is used in some phrase .
There are also individual nouns present in journalistic language (which has a specific vocabulary that must be concise, clear, fair, objective and easy to understand for the audience or readers), in scientific language ( lexicon also exact, precise, clear and objective), in legal language (professional, with particular technicalities of the field of Law) and in technical language (that which is deployed in a discipline or professional field by appealing to jargon or a particular vocabulary understandable to those who dedicate themselves to a specialized field). The presence of individual and other nouns can even be easily detected within poetic language . It is common for playwrights, narrators and poets to include in their compositions some kind of word that falls into the category of individual noun, as happens with "stone" , "mouse" , "pencil" , "tree" , "flower" and " soldier” , among many other words.