Page "Noun" Paragraph 8

Linguists often prefer to define nouns ( and other lexical categories ) in terms of their formal properties.

These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their syntax – how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types.

Such definitions may nonetheless still be language-specific, since syntax as well as morphology varies between languages.

For example, in English it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles ( as stated at the start of this article ), but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.