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This is a portion of a sentence:

...rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds...

Would these be the nouns?

...rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds...

or

...rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds...

...in other words, does "strip" count as a noun in this case? Also, are there any other errors that I have made in identifying the nouns?

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  • What according to you disqualifies a rightful noun from being called a noun? What is the problem with 'strip' here?
    – Kris
    Sep 11, 2014 at 4:52
  • @Kris I mean in terms of the sentence, how it says "a dazzling strip OF."
    – English3545
    Sep 11, 2014 at 4:54
  • That is the essence of your question: Why should an attributive disqualify a noun? What if you say a 'blossom strip' rather than a 'strip of blossoms?' Does that change the part of speech of strip?
    – Kris
    Sep 11, 2014 at 4:56
  • See also: English Language Learners
    – Kris
    Sep 11, 2014 at 5:00
  • A noun in singular can be replaced by he/she/it, a noun in plural by they. It shouldn't be so difficult to see whether a word is a noun or not.
    – rogermue
    Oct 17, 2014 at 7:30

2 Answers 2

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If you rearrange the original wording:

rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds

to this order:

a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, rose suddenly and shockingly

you wouldn't change any of the parts of speech involved, but you would perhaps make the subject easier to identify. As Kris indicates in a comment beneath the original post, "strip" (modified by the adjective "dazzling" and the prepositional phrase "of bright blossoms" is the subject of the portion of the sentence quoted. It's also a noun, as are "blossoms" and "mound."

In short, your third block of boxed text correctly identifies the three nouns in the excerpt.

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The only noun in there seems to be blossoms. All the other words are used in a descriptive fashion making them adjectives

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2
  • Why was i down voted? in the case of "strip" it and the word before it are considered to be compound adjectives. Read the phrase without the word strip and see. Strip is used to describe the shape of the object being referred to
    – alex_zander
    Sep 11, 2014 at 5:00
  • Your faulty use of the term adjective for nouns leads you to faulty conceptions. I would use adjective only for a definite word class. If you use adjective for attribut or nouns that are compound elements or relative clauses you always get into trouble. Modern grammars and dictionaries no longer use the term adjective for nouns as compound elments or for relative clauses. And in structures of the type a sack of potatoes sack is a noun and potatoes. If you call sack an adjective you are only confusing things.
    – rogermue
    Oct 17, 2014 at 8:07

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