GENERAL CHARACTERISTIC

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 493.

I. THE NOUN

UNIT V

1. General characteristic.

2. The category of gender.

3. The category of number.

4. The category of case.

5. The problem of the article.

The noun is a notional word that designates substances in the wide sense of this word.

The noun as a part of speech is characterized by the following features:

a) the lexico-grammatical meaning of 'substance', or 'thingness';

b) typical morphemes (-ist, -er, -ship, -ment, etc.);

c) the categories of number (singular, plural) and case (common, genitive);

d) left-hand connections with articles, prepositions, adjectives, possessive pronouns, nouns, verbs, etc.; right-hand connections with prepositions, verbs;

e) the functions of a subject, complement, predicative, object, attribute, adverbial modifier.

From the point of view of their general meaning nouns can be classified into common, denoting things of the material world, and proper, denoting names of individuals. Common nouns can be further divided into abstract and concrete. This classification takes into account the properties of things rather than the properties of words.

From the grammatical point of view nouns are subdivided into countable and uncountable with regard to the category of number and into declinable and indeclinable with regard to the category of case. There are nouns denoting human beings and animals (e. g. family, party, cattle, poultry) that may be both countable and uncountable. In case they denote a group of animate objects and used in the singular they are called collective nouns (e. g. My family is large). When they are taken to denote a unity of individual members constituting it they are called nouns of multitude (e. g. My family are having dinner now). Most countable nouns are class nouns. In English there are also two specific groups of nouns that have only one form, either singular (e. g. butter, tea, news, knowledge, advice) or plural (e. g. clothes, goods, politics, scissors, trousers). They are called Singularia tantum and Pluralia tantum accordingly.