Nominal

For other uses, see Nominal (disambiguation).

In linguistics, a nominal is a part of speech in some languages that shares features with nouns and adjectives. Similarly, a pronominal functions as a pronoun.

Examples

English

Pronominal can be used either to describe something related to a pronoun or to mean a phrase that acts as a pronoun in the context of nominal. An example of the second case is, "I want that kind". The phrase "that kind" stands in for a noun phrase, or nominal, that can be deduced from context, and is thus categorized as a pronominal. Similarly, the phrase "living there" is a pronominal in the sentence "Living there is very expensive".

Aboriginal Australian languages

Nominals are a common feature of Indigenous Australian languages, many of which do not categorically differentiate nouns from adjectives.

Some features of nominals in some Australian languages include:

• the ability to take grammatical case marking,
• the ability to function substantively (head a noun phrase), and
• the ability to function predicatively (modify another nominal).

Japanese

In Japanese, 形容動詞, keiyō-dōshi (literally "adjectival verbs") can be analyzed as nominals – see adjectival noun (Japanese)

See also

• Noun phrase
• Post-nominal
• Pre-nominal