What is the difference between a material and a concrete noun??
Are 'Promise, truth, lie and comment' countable Abstract nouns??
What others examples can be given for the same.
Learn English – Concrete vs Abstract nouns
abstract-nounsconcrete-nounsgrammarterminologyword-difference
Related Solutions
I think you might be getting stuck on the idea that a noun is either abstract or not abstract (i.e., concrete). This is not quite correct. The same noun is sometimes abstract and sometimes not, depending on how you use it.
Let's use water as an example, because while it isn't an abstract noun, it works the same way and may be easier to visualize.
Water is necessary for life.
Here, we are talking about water in an abstract sense: water as a concept, any and all water. So, we don't use an article.
But once we start talking about a specific instance (in Andrew's terms, a "concrete example") of water, the noun is no longer being used in an abstract sense.
The water from the spring down the road tastes wonderful.
Now, we are referring to some specific water, some water that actually exists in the world. Once we do that, we have to use the article.
So it is with abstract nouns. Andrew's example with size and weight is an excellent one. In the first example, the officer needs to think about size and weight while loading and unloading cargo. In this case, size and weight are ideas, so they are abstract.
But when you associate the concepts of size and weight with a concrete object, such as a container, they stop being abstract. Now, they are characteristics or properties of an existing object, and therefore a specific instance of the two ideas: the size and the weight of the container.
You can perhaps use water again to help with this. Water means all water. As soon as you qualify water, it becomes the water: it is now only that subset of all water that fits the qualification. So, the water in my swimming pool, the water in the sink, the water in my glass, the water in Lake Superior, the water in the Atlantic Ocean, and so on.
So, it might help you to think of weight as all weight, weight not applied to anything concrete. But as soon as you qualify it, it becomes the weight: the weight of a bowling ball, the weight of a feather, the weight of a car, and so on.
Perhaps that helps.
Consider your native language. Nearly all languages have categories of words that name things "Cat" "New York" "Pain", and a category of words that represent actions "run" "enjoy" "be".
All verbs are similar grammatically, for example, they have a present participle: "running" "enjoying" "being". All nouns are similar, for example, nouns can be the subject of a sentence: "The cat is good", "New York is good", "Pain is good".
Some words (eg love) can function both as nouns and verb but in a sentence, each word will either be functioning as a noun or a verb. "I love chips" (love is a verb). "Love is good" (Love is a noun).
A word becomes a noun or a verb when it is used in a sentence. There are also other categories, such as adjective, adverb.
We can sub categorise nouns in many ways. One way is to ask if the noun names a physical object or not. "Cat" is a physical object, so is "food". But "pain" or "love" are not. "Pain" and "love" are abstract nouns.
A verb can represent an action "He kicks the ball." Or a state "He lives in New York". If a verb represents a state it is a stative verb. The present continuous form of an action verb indicates repeated actions "He is kicking the ball (repeatedly)". The present continuous of a stative verb represents a temporary state "He is living in New York (until he finishes school)"
So "Pain" is an abstract noun when we say "Pain is good". "Live" is a stative verb in "He lives in New York".
You probably have the same categories in your language, though they might not correspond exactly to the English categories.
Best Answer
The conventional definition of a concrete noun is something that we can detect with our physical senses: We can see, hear, touch, taste or smell them. There are several problems with this definition, for example nobody would suggest that music is concrete, but we can hear it.
Fumblefingers has proposed a better definition- things that have mass. This is not a sure-fire way of classifying things, though, because a scientist would say that light has mass: he or she can prove that experimentally that it has mass and, for a given colour, can calculate accurately how much each photon weighs. An artist, however, would say that light is abstract.
Scientists have long dealt with this kind of dichotomy of perspective, for example with wave-particle duality: they view light as either particles or waves, depending on what kind of behaviour they wish to predict. Maybe we should look at why exactly we want to classify things as concrete or abstract (what behaviour we want to predict), then we can identify the best way of classifying them.
We use countable and uncountable nouns differently, for example we use a for countable nouns but generally not for uncountable nouns. What differences in usage are there for concrete and abstract nouns? Absolutely none. I can only think of two things, neither related to usage, that give value to the concept of an abstract noun.
First, when we teach grammar and we want to explain what a noun is, it's easy to explain what a concrete noun is: it's a person, place or thing. We need abstract nouns to explain about all of the other nouns- the things that we cannot touch.
Second, when we wish to communicate with people from other cultures, we have to bear in mind that the meanings of concrete nouns are generally communicable, but those of abstract nouns vary between cultures. I had lived in Egypt for eight years before I came across a word for debt: it's an alien concept.
Maybe you can come up with other ways that absrtact adds value, but as far as I am concerned it is an interesting theoretical concept that is of transient practical value for people learning a language. It's definitely not worth splitting hairs over definitions.
As I mentioned earlier, countable is a much more useful concept because it affects how we construct a sentence. Many nouns, though, can be both countable and uncountable: there is duality here. How do we handle that? We proceed as scentists do, and use the appropriate model for the kind of meaning that we want to convey. Looking at promise, for example:
A useful guiding principle is whether the thing you want to describe is atomic: this comes from Greek, and means something that you can't cut. If you can cut something in two and it's no longer the same- its nature has changed- it's countable.
If you take a whole fish and cut it in two: its nature changes: it is no longer a fish. The whole fish was countable. If you take a pieces of fish meat and cut it in two, you have two smaller pieces, but the nature of the fish meat in this context is unchanged. The fish meat is uncountable.
You can apply the atomicity rule to abstract concepts too: the first promise is a general concept, and its nature would be unchanged if you cut it in two: it will still be a general concept, so it is uncountable. The second promise would be of little value if you cut it in two, so its nature has changed: it is countable.