English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in terms of the number of different words and in terms of how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme. English nouns primarily function as the heads of noun phrases, which prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. These phrases are the only English phrases whose structure includes determinatives and predeterminatives, which add abstract specifying meaning such as definiteness and proximity. Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions (e.g., get up and have a stretch), characteristics (e.g., this red is lovely), relations in space (e.g., closeness), and just about anything at all. Taken all together, these features separate English nouns from the language's other lexical categories, such as adjectives and verbs. For the purposes of this article, English nouns include English pronouns, but not English determiners. Subtypes English nouns are classified into three major subtypes as common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns, each with its own typical syntactic behaviour. Proper nouns Proper nouns are a class of words such as December, Canada, Leah, and Johnson that occur within noun phrases (NPs) that are proper names, though not all proper names contain proper nouns (e.g., General Electric is a proper name with no proper noun). The central cases of proper names, according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "are expressions which have been conventionally adopted as the name of a particular entity." A prominent category of proper names are the ones assigned to particular people or animals (Elizabeth, Fido). Others include particular places (New Zealand, the United States of America) and institutions (Cambridge University, the United States Senate). While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun. Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form. For example, we typically expect Michigan but not *Michigans and