3. Grammatical categories.

a) Gender.

In many European languages the names of things, such as book, chair, radio, table have gender: that is they are classified grammatically as masculine, feminine or neuter, although very often gender does not relate to sex. Grammatical gender barely concerns nouns in English. It mainly concerns personal pronouns, where a distinction is drawn between e.g. he, she and it; possessive adjectives his, her and its; and relative pronouns, where a distinction is drawn between who and which. The determiners we use do not vary according to gender in front of nouns. We can refer to a man, a woman, a box, the man, the woman, the box, many men, many women, many boxes.

It should be emphasized that nowadays there is a tendency to avoid gender suffixes (-ess, -ette, -woman, -man, -lady, -lord), which decreases the number of words with “lexical gender”. Such words (usually denoting professions) are replaced by neologisms with no sex indication: stewardess – flight attendant, ploiceman – police offecer, etc.).

Thus, the noun in ME has only two grammatical categories, number and case.

b) Number.

ME, as most other languages, distinguishes between two numbers, singular and plural. The singular number shows that one object is meant, and the plural shows that more than one object is meant. Thus, the opposition is “one – more than one” (dog – dogs, table – tables).

However the category of number in English nouns claim special attention. Thus, there is some difference between three houses and three hours (three separate objects existing side by side and a continuous period of time measured by a certain agreed unit of duration).

If we turn to such plurals as waters or snows, we shall see that we can not say three waters, or three snows. But it is obvious that the plural form of these nouns serves to denote a vast stretch of water (an ocean) or of snow, ground, covered by snow (in the arctic regions of Canada), etc. So we see that between the singular and the plural an additional difference of meaning has developed.

The difference between two numbers may increase to such a degree that the plural form develops a completely new meaning which the singular has not got at all. Thus, the plural form colours has the meaning “banner” (to be in the army) or attentions means “wooing” (pay attentions to a young lady).

Since in these cases, a difference in lexical meaning develops between the plural and the singular, it is natural to say that the plural form has been lexicalized.

We must also consider two types of nouns differing from all others in the way of number: they have not got the usual two number forms, but only one form. The nouns which have only a plural and no singular are usually termed “pluralia tantum” (Lat. “plural only”), and those which have only a singular and no plural are termed “singularia tantum” (Lat. “singular only”).

Among the pluralia tantum are the nouns of two types:

1. the nouns which denote material objects consisting of two halves (trousers, scissors, etc);

2. Those which denote a more or less indefinite plurality (environs, dregs, etc.).

If we compare the English pluralia tantum with the Ukrainian, we shall find that in some cases they correspond to each other (trousers – брюки, scissors – ножиці), while in others they do not (money – гроші).

Close to this group of pluralia tantum nouns are also some names of sciences (mathematics, physics, phonetics) also politics, and some names of diseases (measles, mumps, rickets). They may be accompanied by the indefinite article, and if they are the subject of a sentence the predicate verb may stand in the singular.

The possibility of treating a plural form as if it were singular is also seen in the use of the phrase the United Nations, which may, when it is the subject of a sentence, have the predicate verb in the singular (The United Nations is a world organization).

The direct opposite of pluralia tantum are the singularia tantum, i.e. the nouns which have no plural form. Among these we must first note some nouns denoting material substance, such as milk, butter, quicksilver, etc., and also names of abstract notions, such as peace, usefulness, etc. Nouns of such kind express notions which are, strictly speaking, outside the sphere of number (milk, fluency). But in morphological and syntactical system of English language a noun can not stand outside the category of number. If the noun is the subject of a sentence, the predicate verb (if it is in the present tense) will have to be either singular or plural. With the nouns just mentioned the predicate verb is always singular.

Some nouns denoting substance, or material, may have a plural form, if they are used to denote either an object made of the material or a special kind of substance, or an object exhibiting the quality denoted by the noun. Thus, the noun wine, denotes a certain substance, but it has a plural form wines used to denote several special kinds of wine.

Certain nouns denoting groups of human beings (family, government, party, clergy, etc) and also of animals (cattle, poultry, etc.) can be used in two different ways: either they are taken to denote the group as a whole, and in that case they are treated as singulars, and usually termed “collective nouns” (in restricted sense of the term): or else they are taken to denote the group as consisting of a certain number of individual human beings (or animals), and in that case they are usually termed “nouns of multitude”.

Thus, in two sentences My family is small and My family are good speakers in one sentence the characteristic “small” applies to the family as a whole, while in the other sentence the characteristic “good speakers” applies to every single member of the family (“everyone of them is a good speaker” is what is meant, but certainly not “everyone of them is small”).

c) Case.

The most usual view is that English nouns have two cases: a common case (father) and a genitive or possessive case (father’s). But there are also views, that:

1. The number of cases in English is more than two. Thus, grammarians O. Curme and M. Deutschbein recognize four cases making reference to nominative, genetive, dative and accusative: the genetive can be expressed by the –‘s inflection and by the of-phrase, the dative by the prepositions to and by word-order, and the accusative by word order alone. E. Sonnenschein insists that English has a vocative case since we may prepose an interjection oh before a name.

2. There are no cases at all in English nouns.

B. Ilyish thinks, that part of the discussions and misunderstandings are due to a difference in the interpretation of case as a grammatical category. Thus, case is the category of a noun expressing relations between the thing denoted by the noun and other things, or properties, or actions, and manifested by some formal sigh in the noun itself. This sign is almost always an inflection, and it may also be a “zero” sign, i.e. the absence of any sign may be significant as distinguishing one particular case from another. It is obvious that the minimum number of cases in a given language system is two, since the existence of two correlated elements at least is needed to establish a category. Thus case is part of the morphological system of a language.