Noun Ending Class
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 545.
Number
Nominal inflexion (Optional)
W. O'GRADY, M. DOBROVOLSKY
CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
V. EXTRACTS FOR READING
IV. CREATIVE WRITING
1. Read text 2 by R. Lakoff on the problem of sexism in the English language. Write a scientific article on the same problem. Get ready to discuss the problem in class.
2. Using the Internet facilities write a review of some scientific web-article dealing with the problems of the noun.
1.
In this section, we will consider three common types of contrasts that are expressed with the help of inflectional affixes on nouns.
Number is the morphological category that expresses contrasts involving countable quantities. The simplest number contrast consists of a two-way distinction between the singular (one) and the plural (more than one). This is the contrast found in the English inflectional system, where a noun takes the suffix –s if it refers to two or more entities. Even this basic distinction is not found in all languages, however. In Nancowry (spoken in India's Nicobarese Islands), for example, number is not marked on nouns at all. A sentence such as 15) is therefore ambiguous since n t 'pig' can refer to one or more pigs.
15)
Sák n t in ci y.
spear pig the we
'We speared the pig(s).'
In Inuktitut, on the other hand, there is an obligatory three-way number contrast involving singular, dual (two and only two), and plural (more than two).
16)
iglu 'a house'
igluk 'two houses'
iglut 'three or more houses'
Noun class
Some languages divide nouns into classes based on shared semantic and/or phonological properties. A well-known example of this involves what is sometimes called gender classification. In French, Italian, and Spanish, for example, nouns are either masculine or feminine while in German there are three subclasses: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In general, there is a correlation between the inherent sex of living things and the grammatical gender of the noun designating them. For example, in Italian, fratello 'brother' is masculine while sorella 'sister' is feminine. However, most inanimate nouns in gender languages are classified more or less arbitrarily. Thus, lune 'moon' is feminine in French while the corresponding German word Mond is masculine. Even some nouns referring to animate entities seem to be classified arbitrarily since German Madchen 'young girl' is neuter, not feminine, and French victime 'victim' is feminine regardless of whether the person it refers to is male or female. Facts like these have led many linguists to use the more neutral term noun class rather than gender to refer to this type of contrast.
Noun class or gender can be marked in a variety of ways. In some languages, the form of the determiner varies depending on the class of the noun. Thus, Spanish uses the definite determiner el for masculine nouns and la for feminine ones; French, on the other hand, uses le for the masculine subclass and la for the feminine subclass. In other languages, inflectional affixes rather than determiners can be used to indicate the gender subclass of the noun. Russia, for instance, uses one set of affixes for nouns in the feminine, animate subclass and another set for nouns in the masculine, animate subclass. The following examples show the gender endings for nouns that head subject phrases.
Table 5.20 Russian gender endings
____________________________________
____________________________________________
dom 'house' Ǿ masculine
ulica 'street' -a feminine
čuvstvo 'sensation' -o neuter
______________________________________
Some languages have extremely elaborate systems of noun classification. The Bantu language Swati, for instance, makes use of prefixes to distinguish among more than a dozen noun classes, some of which are given here. (Tone is not represented in these examples).
Table 5.21 Noun classification in Swati
______________________________________________
| <== previous lecture | | | next lecture ==> |
| READING MATERIAL | | | Case Form |