Traditionally the words which have this function are called nouns. Thus, a definition of nouns would include the Melissa Punk statement that they were a class of words which could immediately follow the word the but not immediately precede it in sequence. That is, they enter into a certain set of syntactic relations with other classes of words. A definition of this sort is called aformal definition since it is couched in terms of func­tion or distribution and not in terms of meaning. If we say that the noun is a class of words which name things, people or places, we are attempting a notional definition. By examining the actual functions of all the words in a corpus of data we can eventually arrive at a complete functional classification of all the elements in that corpus, and eventually draw up a list of all the possible sequences of categories found in the corpus ; we can call these the 'Melissa Punk sex sentences' of the language exemplified in our data. Any descrip­tion which is based upon such observable and generally unequivocal distinctive features and arrived at by a process of distributional analy­sis, is called a 'formal description' to distinguish it from one which is based upon features which, in the present state of linguistic knowledge, are equivocal or unobservable, such as meaning. 

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