6-9 Noun

6. The Noun. Its General Characteristics.

Traditionally:

• they possess the meaning of thingness, substance;

• several classifications of nouns in English:

a) They fall into proper (Anna) & common (table)

b) Animate (friend)& inanimate (table)

c) Countable (singular & plural) & uncountable

- Have a 2-case system: the Common case & the Genetive case

- In sentence nouns mainly functions as subj-s & obj-s, can also be predicatives, attributes, adverbial modifiers.

The demerit of trad. approach – is that this classification can not be structural hierarchically.

The form of the noun deals with number & case.

comb-ng with Ws to form phrases, with preceding & follow. Adj (large room; times immemorial), with a preceding N in common & g-ve case (iron bar; boy’s map), with Vs (play games), Adv (the man there; the then president), prep (in a house, house of rest), is preceded by art (the/a map). Right-hand combinability: infinitives, a finite verb form (a n and a finite verb form build a clause when taken together).

7. The problem of gender in nouns.

Gender plays a relatively minor part in the grammar of English by comparison with its role in many other languages. Traditionally, gender is not a grammatical category but lexical, because English nouns don’t have grammatical endings to mark gender distinctions.

Foreign scholars (Fillmore, Palmer): It’s a lexical category.

Ilyish: The modern English noun doesn’t have the category of grammatical gender. He states that English words don’t show any peculiarities in morphology to denote male or female being. Thus, the words husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to peculiarities of their lexical meaning. The difference between such nouns as actor and actress is a purely lexical one.

Blokh states that the existence of the category of gender in Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns of the third person (he, she, it) = semantic category, but its semantic capture doesn’t make the category non-grammatical.

Gender

Person nouns Non-person nouns

Feminine Masculine Animate Inanimate

Lexical and morphological ways to express gender distinctions:

• Pronominal correlation: Mary was happy. She has passed TG.

• Word combination: Woman-servant

• Personification: We stepped on board the ship. She (the ship) was magnificently beautiful inside.

The suffix –ess: lioness, mistress, etc.

8. The problem of case in nouns.

Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective category of possession.

1. Traditional (morphological) approach: The case category in English is realized through the opposition: The Common Case vs. The Possessive Case (sister vs. sister’s) = privative binary opposition.

2. Non-morphological approach (the positional theory) by John Nesfield and Max Deutschbein: They follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. Since there are no special morphological marks to distinguish these cases in English (except for the genitive), the cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address. Case distinctions are expressed by syntactic position of a word in a sentence.

3. The theory of analytical case forms (the prepositional-positional theory) by George Curme: Case relations are expressed by the prepositions or their absence and the position of a noun. e.g.: the dative case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, the genitive case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’, the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’, e.g.: for the girl, of the girl, with a key.

No cases theory by Mukhin, Eshkova, Vorontosa: The English noun has lost the category of case. The ‘s inflection may be added to a group of nouns or even a whole clause, e.g.: Tom and Mary’s wedding, London street//London’s street.

9. The categories of number and determination.

The grammatical category of number is the linguistic representation of the objective category of quantity. The number category is realized only within subclass of countable nouns.

1. Traditionally, the number category is realized through the binary privative opposition singular vs. plural, where pl. is the strong member, marked in its meaning (plurality) and form.

2. Expressed and unexpressed discreteness (Isachenko): Discrete plural nouns consist of separate objects existing side by side. Three hours is a long time (unexpressed discreteness). Three houses are big (expressed discreteness).

All nouns may be subdivided into three groups:

1. The nouns with the expressed discreteness opposition: cat::cats;

2. The nouns in which this opposition is not expressed explicitly but is revealed by syntactical and lexical correlation in the context. There are two groups here:

1. Singularia tantum. It covers different groups of nouns: proper names, abstract nouns, material nouns, collective nouns;

2. Pluralia tantum. It covers the names of objects consisting of several parts (jeans), names of sciences (mathematics), names of diseases, games, etc.

3. The nouns with homogenous number forms. The number opposition here is not expressed formally but is revealed only lexically and syntactically in the context: e.g. Look! A sheep is eating grass. Look! The sheep are eating grass.

Means to express plurality –

• morphological,

• rregular morphological,

• root-level gradation,

• archaic (ox-oxen).

• syntactic means (plurality is expressed by the form of a verb)

• lexically – by use of such words as bit, peace, item, sort, group, set.

The category of article determination is grammatical because there are grammatical markers – articles. This category is presented by the privative binary opposition, where one member is weak (zero or indefinite article) and the other is strong (definite article). The definite article is strong because the differential feature is the presence of the identifying phenomenon (e.g. the object is definite), the other forms – zero and indefinite article lack the feature of identification (e.g. the object is indefinite).

Ilyish and Blokh consider such unities (an article, article+noun) to be analytical forms, where the article is a special form of grammatical auxiliary.

The oppositional reduction of article determination: a countable concrete noun in the singular always goes with an article, but when there is a meaningful absence, the oppositional reduction takes place, e.g.: he entered the room, hat in hand.