Lecture # 1. The noun: grammatical and semantic characteristics. Categories of the noun: gender and case

Major terms: grammatical category, grammatical meaning, grammatical form, grammatical opposition, paradigm.

Grammar from Greek means ‘science (study) of literacy’. In earlier times grammar schools aimed at teaching strict rules of writing and speaking. Such understanding of grammar met this purpose. The interpretation of grammar has undergone some modifications since then: its purpose is to study grammatical structure (morphology and syntax) of language. This is possible in two directions: semantic and structural (content – grammatical meaning and expression – grammatical form). Modern linguistics stresses on the systemic character of language: it is a system of two – facet signs (Russian scholar I. A. Beaudoin de Courtenay and Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure). They distinguished language and speech. Language is a system of means of expression of thoughts (sounds, morphemes, words, word-groups and sentences). Speech is an act of producing utterances and texts. Theoretical grammar deals with grammatical categories: their meanings and forms (means).

Grammatical meaning is a general and abstract meaning of word – classes: cf. the meaning of the plural, case, tense, etc. The grammatical meaning is expressed by grammatical forms which represent grammatical category. Grammatical category is an opposition of grammatical forms based on a grammatical meaning. A grammatical category can be represented by a binary opposition (e.g. the category of number), or triple and more opposition (e. g. the category of tense).

A grammatical category can be expressed by morphological means:

1. Inflections (endings): morphemes which build grammatical forms of a word and have no lexical meaning (e. g., street –s, work-ed).

2. Derivational morphemes (suffixes) read - readable

3. Analytical forms: is coming, has been done. All the components of the form make up the general grammatical meaning. The auxiliary verb denotes an internal paradigmatic meaning of person and number; the whole form denotes the general aspectual, temporal, modal and voice meanings. Between components of analytical forms there can be some syntactic relations.

4. Syntactical forms: He wants to go away / He is wanted – category of voice.

5. Lexical means: woman / man, hen / cock

The noun is a part of speech which denotes the grammatical meaning of substance. It is a nominative category, for it names things, ideas, states, etc. Classes: proper and common; animate and inanimate; countable and uncountable; concrete and abstract nouns. Morphological characteristics: it has categories of gender, number, case, article determination; it has word-building characteristics (affixation, compounding conversion, patterns).

Syntactic functions: subject, object, attribute, and other (adverbial, predicative) functions.

Gender. Two opposite opinions: there is no gender (Smirnitsky and most foreign grammarians), there is gender (it is a lexico-grammatical or semantic category). Gender marks: lexical (cock / hen, male / female, man / woman), compounding of notional words (girl-friend, washer-woman, he-goat), suffixation (lion / lioness, waiter / waitress).

Gender is expressed by binary oppositions: human / non-human which is connected with gender (lady / ship by ‘she’) and masculine / feminine (actor / actress, bull / cow). There can be seen three categories connected: gender – human / non human being – animate / inanimate (lady-she, hen-it). Conclusion: gender is not a grammatical proper but lexico-grammatical or semantic category of the noun. When there is no need to indicate the sex of the referent for different reasons, there is no question of gender marking (salesperson = salesman / saleswoman).

Case is another contradictory and disputable question of the English grammar. Two opposite viewpoints: there is no case (no forms of noun declension) vs there is case expressed by the nominative and genitive (possessive) forms. The possessive seems to be inappropriate for there can be denoted not only possession (Peter’s book / today’s newspaper). Also, compare ‘Michael Chrichton’s book’. In fact, the nominative can express genitive semantics in collocations (noun(al) category, count(able) noun). Conclusion: it is rather a syntactic than a morphological category.

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