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This is one of the factors that rules out smoking from being a verb in the examples further above.

This is one of the factors that rules out smoking from being a noun in the examples further above.

For most modern grammarians there is a major subcategory of the noun class, the PRONOUN, the members of which show slightly different properties and distributions. The remainder of the class can be subdivided into the subcategories of COMMON NOUN and PROPER NOUN. Again, proper nouns have certain properties which mark them out from common nouns. For the purposes of this answer, I am concentrating solely on common nouns. Common nouns may be seen as the central, prototypical members of the noun class.

Nouns and noun phrases also occur much less freely in other types of syntactic roles. So for example, in the following sentence, the noun phrase every three weeks functions as Adjunct of the verb phrase (I use Huddleston & Pullum's terminology here, where ADJUNCT is a special term for a modifier of a verb phrase. Other grammars use the term Adjunct in the same way that the term MODIFIER is used here, namely for an item which is syntactically extra within any given phrase structure):

For most modern grammarians there is a major subcategory of the noun class, the ᴘʀᴏɴᴏᴜɴ, the members of which show slightly different properties and distributions. The remainder of the class can be subdivided into the subcategories of ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴏɴ ɴᴏᴜɴ and ᴘʀᴏᴘᴇʀ ɴᴏᴜɴ. Again, proper nouns have certain properties which mark them out from common nouns. For the purposes of this answer, I am concentrating solely on common nouns. Common nouns may be seen as the central, prototypical members of the noun class.

Nouns and noun phrases also occur much less freely in other types of syntactic roles. So for example, in the following sentence, the noun phrase every three weeks functions as Adjunct of the verb phrase (I use Huddleston & Pullum's terminology here, where ᴀᴅᴊᴜɴᴄᴛ is a special term for a modifier of a verb phrase. Other grammars use the term Adjunct in the same way that the term ᴍᴏᴅɪғɪᴇʀ is used here, namely for an item which is syntactically extra within any given phrase structure):

Note: This post is still being polished! It's also quite long. You may prefer to read the case studies that I'll be posting later.

It seems that the pronoun substitution test is of limited value. The item being replaced may not be a noun. Furthermore nouns can often not be replaced at all depending on their syntactic role. If we have to determine the syntactic role before we do the test there is no point doing it. The reason is that the syntactic role will already tell us how likely an item is to be a noun with the same reliability as the pronoun test. This is because in declarative sentences any item in Subject function will be able to be replaced by a pronoun, whether it's a noun or not. So the chances of the word being replaceable by a pronoun are the same as the chances of the word being a Subject. Neither of these is a guarantee of nounship. The syntactic role that an item has in a given sentence is very rarely a definitive indication of the category of a word. The reason is, of course, that all syntactic roles apart from Predicator may be carried out by more than one type of word.

It seems that the pronoun substitution test is of limited value. The item being replaced may not be a noun. Furthermore nouns can often not be replaced at all depending on their syntactic role. If we have to determine the syntactic role before we do the test there is no point doing it. The reason is that the syntactic role will already tell us how likely an item is to be a noun with the same reliability as the pronoun test. This is because in declarative sentences any item in Subject function will be able to be replaced by a pronoun, whether it's a noun or not. So the chances of the word being replaceable by a pronoun are the same as the chances of the word being a Subject. Neither of these is a guarantee of nounship. The syntactic role that an item has in a given sentence is very rarely a definitive indication of the category of a word. The reason is, of course, that all syntactic roles apart from Predicator may be carried out by more than one type of word or phrase.