What is the main noun in "a year's worth of learning" in the following sentence?

Question

I wonder which noun in the phrase "a year's worth of learning" in the following sentence is the main noun of the phrase. If "a year's worth" is the main noun, then "of learning" should be a phrase that modifies "a year's worth". Otherwise, "learning" should be the main noun and "a year's worth of" be a phrase that modifies "learning".

Why not buy yourself a year's worth of learning at our discount price?

The sentence is from an advertising email sent by a site that sells learning courses. Thank you.

Answer 1

I agree with Andrew that @BillJ really deserves the bounty for having fully answered the question. Since his and Hector's post both seem to miss Mr J's point, however, I'll mention that this is incredibly simple.

... a year's worth of learning ...

has five words. A is being used in its sense of one to modify year's, which is a genitive modifying worth. Learning is the object of the preposition of, whose phrase modifies worth.

Worth

stands alone and is the main noun of the phrase, which is grammatically unimportant because it's the object of buy and its number is irrelevant to the rest of the sentence.

To address OP's fundamental confusion, though, they were correct that semantically "learning" is the most important noun in the phrase. The education is what is being purchased and the focus of thought concerning the topic of the sentence. That's irrelevant to the main noun of the grammatical structure. The dual sense of "main" is what was messing with their head... but any noun controlled by of is part of a phrase that modifies something else in the sentence.

Answer 2

Distilling the comments (which are worth reading): The "main noun" in this sentence is "worth" which BillJ illustrates with the following example:

Compare "A dollar's worth of chocolate is a nice gift" [to] "A dollar's worth of chocolates is a nice gift." Notice how the verb remains unchanged when singular "chocolate" is replaced with plural "chocolates". This proves that "chocolate(s)" is not the head.

Answer 3

According to Oxford learners Dictionary the main noun here is "worth" - a week’s, month’s, etc. worth of something an amount of something that lasts a week, etc.

A year's, a week's, a month's all modify "worth". There is a synonym that we can use instead of "a year's worth" - "yearful". And synonyms for "lasts a year": "yearlong", "year-long".

Answer 4

I think @Mari-LouA and @AraucariaMan hit the nail on the head with her comment under @Andrew's answer and his comment under the OP's, respectively.

In almost any situation where we are trying to parse for meaning, we have to reduce to the lowest common denominator to understand what the speaker wants to say:

1. Why not buy yourself learning at our discount price?
2. Why not buy yourself worth at our discount price?
3. Why not buy yourself a year at our discount price?

To me, it then becomes obvious that "learning" would be the main noun in this case because it's the only one that would not require me to ask a follow-up question.

For example:

2. Why not "buy yourself worth" at our discount price?

What is "buy myself worth" exactly? Buy worth for myself? What is buying "worth" for myself exactly? Buying respect for myself?

3. Why not buy yourself a year at our discount price?

Buy myself a year of what?

1. Why not buy yourself learning at our discount price?

Oh, I see, they sell "learning" of some kind and it's being discounted right now.

Meanwhile, just as @lly says, I don't disagree that grammatically, "worth" may be the main noun.

So I guess the real question is, what had the OP wanted to know? According to the flyer or academically?

Answer 5

Strictly speaking, the analysis provided by @BillJ seems correct, but grammar is mostly descriptive, so I'll describe my perspective.

The main noun in "A year's worth of learning" could be "year's", or more precisely the the omitted referent thereof, while "worth of" is an atypical adjective + preposition, "worth of learning" becoming an adjectival phrase. At least that's how I parse the sentence.

Compare that to "a ship('s storage) full of rice" - content would be the referent of "sack's". Likewise, a sack of rice and a year of learning are understood to mean the same, so I'd say sack or year are the head noun. I supposes that's what you mean by main noun. After all, the basic clause expressed here is "a ship is filled with rice". BillJ is still correct, because by omission of the referent, the adjective moves into the position of a noun. This is more apparent in other examples, because the adjective and noun form of worth don't differ. E.g. we could say a sack('s) filling of rice. That could be corrected to "a sack rice filling", sack becoming a quantifier, the common noun moving into the position of the noun, the verb moving into the participle position. In other languages, the preposition can be omitted even, so it's simply "a sack rice" (e.g. in German).

All that is motivated by the observation of a disagreement about countability (a type mismatch) from pairing an uncountable noun (the worth) with a countable noun (lessons, chocolates, houses). Clearly, "a dollar's worth of chocolate/chocolates" can't be both correct - with "learnings" it wouldn't even make sense, with "lessons" it would again be a type mismatch, whereas "a year of lesson" sounds wrong to begin with. But the length of my explanation hints at the simpler explanation being more likable (not to say likely). On the other hand, countability is a difficult topic, apparently, as the lexical aspect of worth implies countability to some degree. If a binary decision depends on gradual differences, we use fuzzy logic (how many grains are needed to count as sand?). In Linguistics, this is touched upon by Underspecification, i.e. with regards to the function of "worth" in the sentence.

As I said in a comment, this is marketing speech, so the rules of grammar don't strictly apply, anyway. The language might be imprecise on purpose, or simply because language is inherently subject to interpretation.