Question

What is/are the noun(s) in the following sentence?
“The dog is chasing its own tail.”

Answer 1

Hint: The noun is a term that refers to a number of different things like; a person, an area, an object, or it can even represent a concept. Nouns may be used in the following placements: the subject complement, object complement, subject, direct object, indirect object, or adjective in a sentence. There are different types of it like; Proper nouns, common nouns, abstract and many others.

Complete answer:
In order to recognize the different nouns in the sentence, let us look at the given sentence again;
“The dog is chasing its own tail.”
Let us break down the sentence in two parts; its subject and its predicate.
Here the subject would be; “The dog”.
The predicate here will be; “is chasing its own tail.”

Looking at each part carefully, we see that within the subject there is only one possibility for a noun; that is ‘dog’, since ‘the’ is a definite article. Here ‘dog’ would be a thing and it is a common noun. Then from the predicate we can pick out the words which are definitely not nouns, they are; ‘is chasing’, ‘its own’. They cannot be nouns because ‘is chasing’ is a verb, ‘own’ is an adjective and ‘its own’ becomes the pronoun for the noun ‘dog’. So ‘tail’ is the next noun in the sentence, it is again a common noun.
The nouns here are common nouns because they are things that are not specific; they are generic entities.

Therefore the nouns in this sentence are: dog, tail.

Note: There exists a group of abstract nouns; that are words that are not concrete. This group includes terms like justice, pleasure, weariness, among others. Many foreign students who may not speak English as a first language struggle to grasp whether an article should be linked with this or to leave the noun as it is. Every noun in this case is based on the situation.