Noun: Category of Number PDF

view that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun was expressed by H. Sweet and most other scholars; the view that it is an adjective or at least approaches the adjective state — by O. Jespersen. The third interpretation is that the first element is neither a noun nor an adjectiv...

view that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun was expressed by H. Sweet and most other scholars; the view that it is an adjective or at least approaches the adjective state — by O. Jespersen. The third interpretation is that the first element is neither a noun nor an adjective, but a separate part of speech, viz. an attributive noun. The variety of opinions shows that the precise identification of the grammatical status of the element in question has run into considerable difficulties. First of all, it is difficult to apply here the criteria used to distinguish a noun from an adjective. The first element in the phrases like stone wall does not form degrees of comparison, but on the other hand, many English relative adjectives (e. g. golden, linguistic, Japanese) do not have degrees of comparison either. Most practical English grammars have chosen the interpretation that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun in a specific syntactic function. This view appears to be the most plausible. Working bibliography Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 21–22. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 48–55. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 64–65. 7. Noun: Category of Number Modern English, as many other languages, distinguishes between two numbers, singular and plural. Their categorical meaning is clear enough: the singular number shows that one object is meant, the plural shows that two or more objects are meant. Thus, the opposition is “one — more than one” (e. g. student — students, girl — girls, story — stories, etc), with the plural forms being the strong member, marked by the -s inflection in its three phonetic variants: [s], [z], [iz]. There are some closed groups of nouns which display exceptional plural forms: 27 1) Four nouns add the non-productive suffixes -en, -ren (ox — oxen, child — children, brother — brethren, aurochs — aurochsen). 2) Seven nouns change their vowel; this process is known as mutation, or sound alternation (man — men, woman — women, goose — geese, foot — feet, tooth — teeth, mouse — mice, louse — lice). The change does not take place when there is a derived sense, as when louse refers to a person ( you, louses) or mouse to a character (We’ve hired three Mickey Mouses this month). 3) A few nouns have the same form for both singular and plural, even though they are semantically variable, allowing a difference between “one” and “more than one”. Only the context enables us to know which meaning is intended (sheep — sheep, deer — deer, salmon — salmon, aircraft — aircraft, offspring — offspring, series — series, species — species). 4) Many nouns, borrowed from Latin or Greek, have kept the original plural (e. g. alga — algae, larva — larvae, bacterium — bacteria, datum — data, phenomenon — phenomena, criterion — criteria, bacillus — bacilli, locus — loci, nucleus — nuclei, stimulus — stimuli, codex — codices, analysis — analyses, basis — bases, crisis — crises, etc). There are variations of usage with some other Latin or Greek words, that is the original plural form vs Standard English one (e. g. antenna — ae/-s, formula — ae/-s, aquarium — a/-s, maximum — a/-s, medium — a/-s, referendum — a/-s, forum — a/-s, focus — i/-es, fungus — i/es, cactus — i/es, syllabus — i/es, radius — i/ es, index — ices/-es, appendix — ices/-es, apex — ices/-es, vortex — ices/-es, matrix — ices/-es, etc). Many English nouns do not show a contrast between singular and plural. They are classified into several groups. Nouns with the descriptive plural. The plural form of such a noun has a pronounced stylistic coloring due to the usage of the uncountable noun in the function of the countable noun, e. g. the waters of the Atlantic; Arabia, the land of sands; “A Daughter of the Snows” (J. London). The opposition “one — more than one” does not apply here. We could not possibly say three waters, or five snows. The real difference in meaning between water and waters, or snow and snows is that the plural form serves to denote a landscape or seascape in order to impress (a vast 28 stretch of water; the ground covered by snow, etc). A peculiar stylistic value of such forms is evident. Nouns with a fully lexicalized plural form. The plural form develops a completely new meaning which the singular does not have at all, e. g. colour — colours (флаг), custom — customs (таможня). Pluralia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a plural and no singular form. Here belong the names of “two-part” items (trousers, scissors, binoculars, jeans, etc) and nouns of indefinite plurality (annals, amends, auspices, congratulations, dregs, outskirts, remains, thanks, tropics, etc). There are also a few nouns which look singular but are always plural (vermin, people, livestock, etc). Singularia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a singular and no plural form. In fact, they are uncountable, because they denote material substance (air, milk, oxygen, oil, etc) or abstract notions ( peace, usefulness, music, etc). However, such nouns may become countable if they are used to denote objects made of the material (iron — irons), or special kinds of the substance (wine — wines), or objects/persons exhibiting the quality denoted by the noun (beauty — beauties). Names of subjects, diseases, and games, such as linguistics, mathematics, physics, mumps, billiards, etc are always in the singular. Collective nouns and nouns of multitude. These are nouns denoting groups of human beings (family, folk, party, government, police, etc) and also of animals (cattle, poultry) which can be used in two different ways: either they are taken to denote the group as a whole, or else they are taken to denote the group as consisting of a number of individuals (e. g. My family is small — My family are early risers). Working bibliography Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 55–60. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language / D. Crystal. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. P. 200–201. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 36–41. 29 8. Noun: Category of Case The problem of case in Modern English nouns is one of the most difficult problems in English grammar. The traditional view presented in most practical grammars is that English nouns have two cases: a common case (e. g. father) and a possessive or genitive case (e. g. father’s). However, there are some other views which can be divided into two main groups: 1) the number of cases in English is more than two; 2) there are no cases at all in Modern English nouns. The classical definition of the grammatical category of case reads: “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 sign in the noun itself ”. This sign is almost always an inflection, and it may also be a zero sign i. e. the grammatically meaningful absence of any sign. It is obvious that the minimal number of case forms in a given language system is two because at least two grammatically correlated elements are needed to establish a category. Thus case is a part of the morphological system of a language. With this interpretation in view, it is hardly possible to accept the theories which hold that case may also be expressed by prepositions or by the word order. It is the position of Max Deutschbein and some other scholars that Modern English nouns have four cases, viz. nominative, genitive, dative and accusative, of which the genitive case is expressed by the -‘s inflection and by the preposition of, the dative — by the preposition to and also by the word order, and the accusative is distinguished from the dative by the word order alone. But there is a contradiction here pointed out by B. A. Ilyish. He says that once we admit prepositions, or word order, or any other non-morphological means of expressing case, the number of cases may grow indefinitely. There may be an instrumental case expressed by the preposition with, or a locative case expressed by the preposition in, or any other case. That view would mean abandoning the idea of the morphological category of case and confusing wordforms with syntactic phenomena. It seems obvious that the two-case system (the common case and the possessive case) is a reasonable choice from the morphological point of view. It should be kept in mind, however, that the possibility of 30 forming the possessive case, also referred to as s-genitive, is limited to English nouns denoting living beings (first of all, person nouns, e. g. my father’s room) and a few others (those denoting units of time, e. g. this year’s elections, and also some substantivized adverbs, e. g. yesterday’s news). It should also be noted that this limitation is not too strict and there seems to be some tendency at work to use the s-genitive more extensively (e. g. a work’s popularity, the engine’s life). The other problem with the possessive case is the possibility in Modern English of such expressions as Smith and Brown’s office, the King of England’s residence, the Oxford professor of poetry’s lecture, etc in which the -‘s refers to the whole group of words. In such collocations as somebody else’s child, nobody else’s business the word immediately preceding the -‘s inflection is an adverb which could not by itself have the possessive (genitive) case form. Formations of this kind are not rare. In Sweet’s famous example, the man I saw yesterday’s son, the -‘s inflection refers to the whole attributive clause. All these phenomena give rise to doubts about the existence of a traditional morphological case system in Modern English, in particular about the form in -‘s being a case form at all. The problem of case in Modern English has been variously interpreted by many scholars, both in this country and elsewhere. M. Y. Blokh says that four special views should be considered as essential in the analysis of this grammatical phenomenon. The first view called “the theory of positional cases” is directly connected with old grammatical tradition and can be found in the works of J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutschbein, M. Bryant and some other scholars. According to them, the English noun, on the analogy on classical Latin grammar, could distinguish, besides the inflectional genitive case, also the noninflectional, i. e. purely positional cases: nominative, vocative, dative, and accusative. The prerequisite for such an interpretation is the fact that the functional meanings rendered by cases can be expressed in language by non-morphological means, in particular, by word-order. The second view is called “the theory of prepositional cases”. It is also connected with the old school grammar teaching and was advanced as a logical supplement to the positional view of the case. In accord with 31 the prepositional theory, combinations of nouns with prepositions in certain collocations should be understood as morphological case forms. To these belong first of all the dative case (to +noun, for + noun) and the genitive case (of + noun). These prepositions, according to G. Curme, are “inflectional prepositions” equivalent to case inflections. The prepositional cases are taken, by the scholars who recognize them, as coexisting with positional cases together with the classical inflectional genitive (possessive) completing the case system of the English noun. The third view of the English noun case recognizes a limited inflectional system of two cases in English: the common case and the possessive (genitive) case. The limited case theory is most broadly accepted among linguists. It was developed by such scholars as H. Sweet, O. Jespersen. In the works of A. I. Smirnitsky and L. S. Barkhudarov it is presented as an oppositional system, the genitive form marked with the -‘s inflection being the strong member of the categorical opposition, the common, or the non-genitive form being the weak member. The limited case theory applies to the noun-forms with the -‘s inflection; the specific word-combinations of the type Smith and Brown’s office, somebody else’s daughter, etc, where the -‘s refers to the whole phrase, are not taken into consideration. The forth view of the problem of the English noun cases treats the English noun as having lost the category of case in the course of its historical development. All the noun cases, including genitive, are regarded as extinct. The only existing case inflection -‘s is described by the proponents of this approach (G. N. Vorontsova and some other scholars) as a specific postpositional element — the possessive postposition. One cannot but acknowledge the rational character of this reasoning; it is based on the careful observation of the linguistic data. For all that, however, the theory of the possessive postposition fails to take into account the inflectional nature of the -‘s. We have considered theoretical aspects of the problem of case of the English noun. As a result of the analysis, we may come to the conclusion that the inflectional case of nouns in English has practically ceased to exist. The remaining two-case system has a limited application in the expression of various case relations in Modern English. 32 The personal pronouns in English are commonly interpreted as having a case system of their own, quite different from that of nouns. The two cases traditionally recognized here are the nominative case (I, you, he, etc.) and the objective case (me, you, him, etc). Working bibliography Прибыток И. И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка / И. И. Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 35–46. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 61–72. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 41–48. 9. Adjective It is common knowledge that adjectives are words expressing properties of objects. They are divided into qualitative and relative adjectives. But there is not much to be said about the English adjective from the morphological point of view; it has neither number, nor case, nor gender distinctions. To recognize adjectives in a text one should take into account their semantic and syntactic features. Derivative suffixes may also be helpful. Among these are the suffixes -al, -ial (national, residential), -ful (doubtful), -less (useless), -y (dusty), -like (ghostlike). They are used to derive adjectives from nouns. There are two suffixes, -ive (progressive) and -able (readable), to derive adjectives from verbal stems. On the whole, the number of adjectives which are recognized by their suffixes is insignificant as compared with the mass of English adjectives. Degrees of Comparison. The only morphological problem concerning English adjectives is the category of degrees of comparison. Most practical grammars only focus on the ways of forming degrees of comparison: 1) the synthetical pattern (with the suffixes -er, -est); 2) the analytical pattern (more + Adj.; the most + Adj.); 3) the suppletive formations (e. g. good — better — the best; bad — worse — the worst). Theoretical interpretation of degrees of comparison is not so easy. The first question which arises here is about the number of them. How many degrees of comparison does the adjective have? If we take the 33