Is this sentence grammatically correct-"Can someone tell me, what is noun?"? Are punctuation used correctly in the sentence? What about the sentence-" Can someone tell me, what noun is?"
Through no fault of the OP's, and unbeknownst to any of the commenters, this is a very interesting question, actually.
I would argue that yes, "what is noun" is grammatical.
In order to know that it should be a noun, you would need to know at least one thing about what a noun is. And that might well not be the case, as the very nature of the question suggests.
If you've never seen a word before and know nothing about it, you might well get the countability wrong from just the one time that you've encountered it.
I say "yesterday I bought new bayan strings", and you wonder "what is bayan?" Or I say "I fell in a tar pit", and you ask "what is a tar?"
The answer would then begin by correcting just that. I would reply "tar is a substance...", silently dropping the article, or I would reply "a bayan is an instrument...", adding one.
But that doesn't make your question ungrammatical in retrospect. That's not how it works. You just asked a question.
So yeah. Likewise if you'd never seen the word "noun" before and see the phrase "noun adjuncts are formed by blah", then you could wonder "what is a noun?" or you could wonder "what is noun?" and both would be equally fine, and the latter probably even more likely.
(Though of course the elephant in the room is that everybody would just ask "what does 'noun' mean?" instead.)
> A British tar is a soaring soul As free as a mountain bird His energetic fist should be ready to resist A dictatorial word His nose should pant and his lip should curl His cheeks should flame and his brow should furl His bosom should heave and his heart should glow And his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow
His eyes should flash with an inborn fire His brow with scorn be wrung He never should bow down to a domineering frown Or the tang of a tyrant tongue His foot should stamp and his throat should growl
@marcellothearcane precisely right. And so by that very reasoning, upon hearing "I bought a hat rack", you would have to ask "what is hat", and not "what is a hat". See how it works?
You just do not know if a modifier actually is an adjective, or a noun in its own right.
You have to guess, and your chances are 50/50.
And then the noun could be countable or uncountable, or a proper name.
Imagine you've never encountered the word "tula" before. And I am telling you a story, constantly going tula this and tula that. So naturally you interrupt me and ask, "sorry mate, what's a tooler?" And certainly we all can agree that that's a perfectly grammatical and idiomatic thing to ask.
Except, of course, I then answer, "Tula is the name of a city in Russia".
There is no such thing as "a tula". It's a proper noun. And yet what you asked was nonetheless perfectly grammatical, as we only just agreed.
Same for hat racks and tar pits and noun adjuncts. You just don't know if it's "hat" or "a hat", "tar" or "a tar", "noun" or "a noun". That's the whole point of you asking in the first place. So you just pick whichever. And whichever you've picked, is perfectly grammatical.
Is this sentence grammatically correct-"Can someone tell me, what is noun?"? Are punctuation used correctly in the sentence? What about the sentence-" Can someone tell me, what noun is?"
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…