Material Nouns

 Material Noun are names of materials or substances out of which things are made. Ex: gold, iron, silver etc.”

Material noun is the name given to the material, substance or things made up of alloy. It refers to the type of substance instead of individual particles of the substance. Material nouns are not countable means we cannot count them because they are in the forms of liquid, semi-liquid or solid. This noun is especially called as material noun because nouns in this class are almost materials like cloth, air, metal, gold, salt, iron, silver, steel, brass, bronze, copper, aluminium, lead, coal, coral, gem, diamond, glass, fibre, calcium, plastic, rubber, paper, cement, paint, plywood, synthetics, shampoo, soap, perfume, wine, tar, chemical, rexene etc. Sometimes we cannot make the plural forms of material noun.

Some of the material nouns are used as the count nouns, for example; 'wine' as one may talk about different wines, type of wine instead of the substance of wine. So, here we can say that wine is not a material noun as type of wine is countable. We can say that material nouns are common nouns as they denote substances instead of denoting people or places.

For examples:

• Cotton dresses are very cheap and comfortable.
• My mom purchased a gold ring for me.
• I drink milk in the silver
• My father has a shop for diamonds.
• Calcium is a good mineral for health.
• Plastic is made up of many molecules of ethylene.
• There are many utensils in my kitchen made up of iron.
• Taj Mahal is built using marbles.
• I drink milk daily in the night.
• Most of the industries use fibre.
• In the ancient time, most of the kitchen utensils were made up of brass.

Categorized Examples of Material Nouns

Material nouns are names given to the raw elements or objects exist in the nature and cannot be created by human being, however many new things can be created by man using raw materials. The main source of raw materials are nature, animals and plants. We have provided below the list of common nouns under various categories such as:

Material nouns from nature: water, air, silver, gold, iron, copper, sand, coal, rock, sunlight, rain, earth, salt, etc.

Material nouns from animals: egg, meat, honey, milk, silk, leather, wool, etc.

Material nouns from plants: cotton, food, oil, wood, jute, coffee, medicine, tea, rubber, perfume, etc.

Man made material nouns: acid, alcohol, asphalt, brick, cement, butter, chalk, ghee, cheese, dacron, ebony, enamel, felt, gelatin, paraffin, cloth, etc.

Rules to be followed while using material nouns in the Sentence:

Following are the rules you need to remember in order to make use of material nouns in the sentence.

a) Generally, articles (a, an or the) are not used with material nouns when they are uncountable such as:

• Honey is wholesome food and beneficial to health.
• Water boils only at 100°C temperature.

b) Articles (a and an) may be used with material nouns when they are countable (denoting types of material or showing helping nature) such as:

• I would like to eat a Dutch cheese.
• It is a very healthy wine.

c) Use of 'the' and 'some' can also be done in the following way:

• The honey in the bottle is mine. Don’t give it others!
• I saw there is some milk in the glass.

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Meaning

Ferdinand de Saussure in founding semiology, his original subset of the semiotics, started describing language in terms of Signs, dividing those signs in turn into signifieds and signifiers. The signifier is the perceptive side of a sign, thus the sound form in case of oral language. The signified is the signification (semantic) side, the mental construction or image associated with the sound, by either a speaker and hearer. A sign, then, is essentially a relationship between signified and signifier.

Signs are essentially conventional, as any foreign language student is well aware: there is no reason that bat couldn't mean "body of water" or even "that bust of Napoleon over there". Since the choice of signifiers is ultimately arbitrary, the meaning cannot somehow be in the signifier. Saussure instead defers meaning to the sign itself: meaning is ultimately the same thing as the sign, and meaning means that relationship is between signified and signifier. All meaning is both within us and communal, thus cultural. Signs "mean" by reference to our internal lexicon and grammar, and despite there being a matter of convention, so the communal part, signs also, because of the individual's uniqueness, can mean something only to the individual (what red means to one person may not be what red means to another, either in absolute value, or by including what's suggested by the context). However, while meanings carried by one given set of signifiers may vary to some extent from individual to individual, only those meanings that stay within a boundary are seen by other speakers of the language to belong to the language: if one were to refer to smells as red, most other speakers would assume the person is talking nonsense (although statements like this are common among people who experience synesthesia, or in poetry).

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Metaphor

Metaphor is a figure of speech that refers, for rhetorical effect, to one thing by mentioning another thing. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile are all types of metaphor. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances[...]

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7

This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937) by rhetorician I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed. In the previous example, "the world" is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of "the stage"; "the world" is the tenor, and "a stage" is the vehicle; "men and women" is the secondary tenor, and "players" is the secondary vehicle.

Other writers employ the general terms ground and figure to denote the tenor and the vehicle. Cognitive linguistics uses the terms target and source, respectively.

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Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept. The words metonymy and metonym come from the Greek: μετωνῠμία, metōnymía, ("a change of name"), from μετά, metá, ("after, beyond"), and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνῠμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, ("name").

The location of a capital is often used as a metonym for a government or other official institutions—for example: Brussels for the institutions of the European Union, Nairobi for the government of Kenya, Washington, D.C., for the federal government of the United States, or Beacon Hill for the government of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. A place can represent an entire industry: for instance Wall Street is often used metonymically to describe the entire U.S. financial and corporate banking sector. Common nouns and phrases can also be metonyms: red tape can stand for bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy actually uses red tape to bind documents. In Commonwealth realms, The Crown is a metonym for the state in all its aspects.

Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, multiple meanings of a single word or phrase, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity.

American literary theorist Kenneth Burke described metonymy as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, a substitute for perspective; metonymy, a substitute for reduction; synecdoche, a substitute for representation; and irony, a substitute for dialectic. He described these tropes and the way they overlap in A Grammar of Motives.

In addition to its use in everyday speech, metonymy is a figure of speech in some poetry and in much rhetoric. Greek and Latin scholars of rhetoric made significant contributions to the study of metonymy.

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Modal Auxiliary Verbs.

Modal auxiliary verbs never change form. You cannot add an -ed, -ing, or -s ending to these words. Can, could, may, might, must, ought to, shall, should, will, and would have only one form.

You can use modal auxiliary verbs in these patterns:

MODAL + MAIN VERB

MODAL + BE + PRESENT PARTICIPLE

MODAL + HAVE + PAST PARTICIPLE

With modal auxiliaries, you can indicate necessity or obligation:

To lose her orange glow, Yvonne should eat fewer carrots.

John must remember his wife's birthday this year.

If Cecilia wants a nice lawn, she ought to be raking the leaves.

Or you can show possibility:

Fred might share his calculus homework if you offer him a slice of pizza.

Ann could have run the half marathon if she had started to train four months ago.

Modal auxiliaries also show willingness or ability:

Nicole will babysit your pet iguana for a reasonable fee.

Jason can pass chemistry this semester if he stops spending his study time at the arcade.

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Morpheme

    Morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

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