Noun groups

From this lesson, we really want you to walk away knowing three things about noun groups, in order of priority:

• Function—what do they do?
• Boundaries—where do they begin and end?
• Components—what are they made from?

We’re going to show you what we mean now, like a preview, then through the lesson we'll go into some detail, and at the end we’ll revisit these concepts and we’ll see if you’ve learned something.

Question 1: What is the function of a noun group?

We can actually answer that right now: the job of a noun group is to represent the things in your sentence.

But 'thing' is a trickier concept than you might think!

• A thing can be real like a sock, or imaginary like a dragon.
• A thing can be tangible like a banana, or abstract like justice.
• A thing can be a person like you, an animal like that octopus from My Octopus Teacher, or an object like a gravestone.
• A thing can be unnamed or generic like a cathedral, or it can be named and specific like Notre Dame.

All of these are 'things' in the grammatical sense, and all are represented in sentences by nouns and noun groups (and also pronouns, which we'll also talk about in this lesson).

Question 2: What are the boundaries around a noun group?

Here’s a sentence with one thing which is represented by one word. That one word is what we call a noun, which is the bare minimum you need to represent a thing in a sentence.

Here is a sentence with two things:

But this next snippet has a thing that is represented by a group of words, and this is what we mean by a noun group—not a group of things, but a group of words to describe a thing.

When we say we want you to learn how to spot the boundaries around a noun group, we mean learning to recognise where they begin and end.

Here are a few sentences you’ll meet during this lesson. Can you spot the noun groups? Can you see where they begin and end?

(Don't worry if you can't right now; we're just warming up.)

Question 3: What are the components of a noun group? 

If noun groups can have more than word, what do those different words do?

Your body is a thing that contains a heart, lungs, brain and so on—each with its own job. A noun group is the same: different words inside the noun group have different jobs, and we can give these jobs names. 

Look at Tristan's mystery powder in the snippet below: each of the words does a specific job:

• A pointer is a word that helps determine who owns a thing.
• A classifier is a word that tells us about types of thing.
• A noun is the core thing at the heart of the noun group.

In this lesson, we want you to learn to recognise each of these components and maybe even remember what they are called (but honestly remembering them all is a bonus). 

Check out the next two snippets to see how elaborate some of these noun groups can get!

So that's a quick summary of what we'll be doing in this lesson!

If you walk away from this lesson being able to point to a piece of text and say, “Here are the noun groups, here’s where they begin and end, and here’s what the words inside them are doing,” then that is a success. 

Let’s dive in!