Lecture 4 Noun and Article The category of

Lecture 4. Noun and Article The category of Case The category of Number The category of Gender Syntactic functions

Questions Define the Noun Speak about: The category of case The category of number, The category of gender Syntactic functions

Noun – a part of speech, which denotes objects, lively beings, and can function in the sentence mostly as a subject and object. Plato, Aristotle – Subject and Object of an action, opposed to predicate. Дионисий Фракийский: «Имя есть склоняемая часть речи, обозначающая тело или вещь бестелесную»

Old English (5 -11 century) Case category: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative singular plural N. Steorra steorran G. Steorran steorrena D. Steorran steorrum A. Steorran steorran

Category of Case – morphological category, that reflects the relations of a noun with other words in the sentence (with the form of the noun itself). Common Case Possessive Case

Singular Plural CC boys PC boy’s boys’ From pronunciational point of view it’s very difficult to differentiate between the forms The house was good The walls of the house We came up to the house The Common Case doesn’t denote any particular meaning

Possessive Case is lexically restricted by animate nouns or inanimate denoting distance, price, time periods: A week’s notice, at a miles distance, a shillings worth of sugar But: the car’s roof, the ship’s captain, the door’s support Possessive Case can be come across in preposition. But: It was Tom’s, the idea of Tom’s

Possessive Case is restricted by context – is not used with nouns in the plural Refers to word groups: John and Tom’s room, The Prime Minister of England’s speech Can be used with other parts of speech: somebody else’s car Modifies nouns as Common Case: the car’s roof, the car roof

The Category of Case in the English Language has been destructed and lost it’s morphological manifestations. ‘s some scholars consider as a form of Possessive category

Category of Number : singular – plural Case system destruction endings unification: -as -es: OE: bok – bek – ME bokes

Case system destruction reduction of the plural suffixes -as > -es: wordes, scipu-scipes, sones The system has become unified: OE bok – bek, ME bokes

Archaic forms OE oxe – oxen, child – children ME: fot – fet gos – ges toth – teth mus – mis lus – lis man - men Sheep, deer, swine + thing, year, horse

Classes of Nouns due to the Category of Number : Countable N. - denoting discreet objects or phenomena Uncountable N. Materials Abstract things and substance anger, gratitude sugar, air But: the wines of Armenia, the horrors of the war, the snows of Kilimanjaro

Collective Nouns Denote a number of objects as a whole: army – armies, crowd – crowds But: the peasantry, the cavalry are used in the singular, but followed by a verb in the plural: the peasantry are Family, group, team… - is/are Pluralia tantum – a group of collective nouns, denoting objects that consist of 2 and more parts: shorts, scissors, spectacles…

Types of Nouns due to Number Category: - en: oxen, children Of Latin origin: phenomenon – phenomena, stimulus – stimuli, datum – data, antenna – antennae With vowel interchange: foot – feet Singular and Plural forms are the same: sheep, deer, swine…

Gender: masculinum, femininum, neutrum Wif – жена (N) Wifman – женщина (M) Lond – страна(N) Hond – рука (F) Stan – камень (M) Snaw – снег (M) Treow – дерево (N) Duru – дверь (F)

Gender The category had disappeared by the 15 th century. Biological sex instead of Gender: Boy-girl, bull-cow, lion-lioness (Lehrer-Lehrerin), he-goat-she-goat B. Stang: the category of gender does exist as each word can be substituted by “he”, “she” or “it”

Syntactic functions: Subject Object Part of the Predicate: She is a student Attribute in preposition: a stone wall, the sea breeze, the speed limit

a stone wall 1. Noun Adjective 2. A compound word But: 1. the noun doesn’t acquire the degree of comparison and combine with an adverb. 2. a compound word is a fixed combination. In this case component combine spontaneously. It’s attributive word group

Questions Define the Noun Speak about: The category of case The category of number, The category of gender Syntactic functions