Comparison of nouns in English and Russian languages — страница 3

  • Просмотров 9196
  • Скачиваний 73
  • Размер файла 102
    Кб

they are inflected for the singular. A collective predicate is a predicate that normally can't take a singular subject. An example of the latter is "surround the house." Good: The boys surrounded the house. Bad: *The boy surrounded the house. Good: The committee surrounded the house. [11.p.62] Concrete nouns and abstract nouns Concrete nouns refer to definite objects—objects in which you use at least one of your senses. For instance, "chair", "apple", or "Janet". Abstract nouns on the other hand refer to ideas or concepts, such as "justice" or "hate". While this distinction is sometimes useful, the boundary between the two of them is not always clear. In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming

suffixes ("-ness", "-ity", "-tion") to adjectives or verbs. Examples are "happiness", "circulation" and "serenity". 1.2 Morphological characteristics of the Nouns The noun has the following morphological characteristics: Nouns that can be counted have two numbers: singular and plural (e.g. singular: a girl, plural: girls). 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." [4, p.110] "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?" [2, p.385] "A living cat is better than a dead lioness". [2, p.230] "Saint George, that swinged the dragon, and e’er since Sits

on his horse back at mine hostess’ door." [5, p.447] 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.[23] 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. 1.3 Morphological composition of nouns According to their morphological composition we distinguish simple, derivative and compound nouns. Simple nouns are nouns which have neither prefixes nor suffixes.