Count non-count

PROPER COMMON

NOUNS

NOUN AND ITS GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES

1. Introduction. The categories of gender and number.

2. The category of case.

· The 2-case system (Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen).

· The 4-case system (G. Curme).

· The 3-case system (H. Whitehall).

· The theory denying the existence of the category of case in English (G.N. Vorontsova, B.A. Ilyish, A.M. Mukhin).

3. The syntactic function of the noun.

1. Introduction. The categories of gender and number

The categorial meaning of the noun is identified as substantiality or thingness. It follows from this that the noun is the main nominative part of speech because any property of substances as well as of actions and states can be isolated and presented as self-dependent substances: e.g. beauty, necessity, bitterness. Thus nouns refer to things, substances, beings, phenomena, and abstract concepts. On the whole nouns comprise concrete objects and abstract concepts taking these two groups together.

According to their specific uses nouns can be characterized further. They are subdivided into proper, i.e. nouns used for particular persons, places, things, or ideas which are, or imagined to be, unique, and common which are not names of particular persons, places, things or ideas. Common nouns are further divided into countable (sometimes called unit or count nouns) and uncountable (sometimes known as mass or non-count nouns). Grammarians cannot help mentioning that common sense is not always the best guide to decide whether the noun is countable or not. That is why their suggestion is to think in terms of countable or uncountable uses of nouns [Alexander 1995: 39]. Both groups have further subdivisions into concrete and abstract nouns. And again diverse language manifestations defy straightforward analysis and strict classifications.

Chart 1. The classification of nouns

according to L. Alexander (1995):

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