Categories of Noun

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Кафедра английского языка 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Morphological characteristics of the Nouns 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Выполнила: 
 
 

Самара-2012 

Morphological characteristics of the Nouns 

     The noun has the following morphological characteristics:

1. Nouns that can be counted have two numbers: singular and plural (e.g. singular: a girl, plural: girls).
2. Nouns denoting living being (and some nouns denoting lifeless things) have two case forms: the common case and the genitive case.

     It is doubtful whether grammatical category of gender exists in Modern English for it is hardly ever expressed by means of grammatical forms.

     There is practically only one gender-forming suffix in Modern English, the suffix -es, expressing feminine gender. It is not widely used.

     heir- heir-ess

     poet- poet-ess

     actor- actor-ess

     waiter- waitr-ess

     host- host-ess

     lion- lion-ess

     tiger- tigr-ess

     Gender, i.e. the distinction of nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter, may be expressed lexically by means of different words or word-compounds:

     father- mother man- woman

     boy- girl gentleman- lady

     husband- wife cock-sparrow- hen-sparrow

     boy-friend- girl-friend man-servant- maid-servant

     "She is heiress to the throne."

     "Is there a parson, much bemused in beer,

     A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,

     A clerk, foredoomed his father’s soul to cross,

     Who pen’s a stanza, when he should engross?"

     "A living cat is better than a dead lioness".

     "Saint George, that swinged the dragon, and e’er since

     Sits on his horse back at mine hostess’ door." 

     In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below: 

     That apple on the table is fresh.

     Those two apples on the table are fresh. 

     The number of apples is marked on the noun — "apple", singular number (one item) vs. "apples", plural number (more than one item) —, on the demonstrative, "that/those", and on the verb, "is/are". Note that, especially in the second sentence, this information can be considered redundant, since quantity is already indicated by the numeral "two".

     A language has grammatical number when its nouns are subdivided into morphological classes according to the quantity they express, such that:

     Every noun belongs to a single number class. (Number partitions nouns into disjoint classes.)

     Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs have different forms for each number class, and must be inflected to match the number of the nouns they refer to. (Number is an agreement category.)

     This is the case in English: every noun is either singular or plural (a few, such as "fish", can be either, according to context), and at least some modifiers of nouns — namely the demonstratives, the personal pronouns, the articles, and verbs — are inflected to agree with the number of the nouns they refer to: "this car" and "these cars" are correct, while "this cars" or "these car" are ungrammatical.

     Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words.

     The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc.