For example, the sentence “theeconomy is stagnating because the government cannot control infl ation”
expresses a causal relation between three abstract nouns.
Names can be seen as special cases of nouns. The difference is that
names typically pick out a unique referent. If the basic communicative
function of a noun is to express a referent and names identify a unique
referent, why then does not everything have a name? It would seem
that if every object had a name, this would eliminate many ambiguities.
The reason why nouns are needed is one of cognitive economy (see for
example, Kemp and Regier 2012). Our memory is severely constrained
and it would be impossible to learn and remember a name for all objects
one wants to communicate about. Nouns referring to basic-level
categories group objects in categories that are suitably large for communication
so that ambiguities become suffi ciently rare. The cognitive
solution is a balance between the precision of the noun and the number
of words that have to be remembered.