5. Grammatical categories and parts of speech.

Category is a logical notion denoting the reflection of the most general properties of phenomena. Categorial meanings in grammar are expressed by grammatical paradigms. Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized categorial meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms. In other words, it is a unity of a generalized grammatical meaning and the forms of its expression. Paradigmatic correlations are exposed by “oppositions” of grammatical forms - the members of a paradigm. Opposition members are characterized by two types of features: common features and differential features. On the basis of various combinations of common and differential features, several types of oppositions are distinguished. The prevalent type in English grammar is a binary privative opposition. The term “binary” means, that the opposition consists of two members, or forms; besides binary oppositions, there are oppositions, that may include more than two members (‘ternary’, ‘quaternary’, etc.).

6,7. The noun and its categories.

The categorial meaning of the noun is “substance” or “thingness”. Formally, the noun is characterized by a specific set of word-building affixes and word-building models, which unmistakably mark a noun, among them: suffixes of the doer (worker, naturalist, etc.), suffixes of abstract notions (laziness, rotation, security, elegance, etc.), special conversion patterns (to find – a find), etc. As for word-changing categories, the noun is changed according to the categories of number (boy-boys), case (boy-boy’s), and article determination (boy, a boy, the boy). Formally the noun is also characterized by specific combinability with verbs, adjectives and other nouns, introduced either by preposition or by sheer contact. The noun is the only part of speech which can be prepositionally combined with other words, e.g.: the book of the teacher, to go out of the room, away from home, typical of the noun, etc. The most characteristic functions of the noun in a sentence are the function of a subject and an object, since they commonly denote persons and things as components of the situation, e.g.: The teacher took the book. Besides, the noun can function as a predicative (part of a compound predicate), e.g.: He is a teacher; and as an adverbial modifier, e.g.: It happened last summer. The noun in English can also function as an attribute in the following cases: when it is used in the genitive case (the teacher’s book), when it is used with a preposition (the book of the teacher), or in contact groups of two nouns the first of which qualifies the second (cannon ball, space exploration, sea breeze, the Bush administration, etc.).

On the basis of “type of nomination” proper nouns are opposed to common nouns. Common nouns present a general name of anything belonging to a certain class of things, e.g.: river – any river, boy – any boy, while the proper nouns have no generalized meaning; they serve as a label, a nickname of a separate individual being or thing, e.g.: Mississippi, John, New York, etc. On the basis of “form of existence” of the referents animate nouns are opposed to inanimate nouns, the former denoting living beings (man, woman, dog), the latter denoting things and phenomena (tree, table). On the basis of “personal quality” human animate nouns (person nouns), denoting human beings, or persons, are opposed to non-human (animate and inanimate) nouns (non-person nouns), denoting all the other referents. Only human nouns in English can distinguish masculine or feminine genders, e.g.: man – he, woman – she, while the non-human nouns, both animate and inanimate, are substituted by the neuter gender pronoun ‘it’. On the basis of “quantitative structure” of the referent countable (variable) nouns are opposed to uncountable (invariable) nouns, the former denoting discrete, separate things which can be counted and form discrete multitudes, e.g.: table – tables, the latter denoting either substances (sugar), or multitudes as a whole (police), or abstract notions (anger), and some others entities. This subdivision is formally manifested in the category of number.

Case is the morphological category of the noun showing the relations of the nounal referent to other objects and phenomena. The category of case in English constitutes a great linguistic problem. Linguists argue, first, whether the category of case really exists in modern English, and, second, if it does exist, how many case forms of the noun can be distinguished in English. The main disagreements concern the grammatical status of “noun + an apostrophe + –s” form. There are four approaches, advanced at various times by different scholars, concerning the problem.

1) The approach which can be defined as “the theory of positional cases” was developed by J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutchbein, M. Bryant. They follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. The cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address.

2) The approach which can be defined as “the theory of the possessive postposition”, or “the theory of no case” states that the category of case which did exist in Old English was completely lost by the noun in the course of its historical development. The proponents (сторонники) of this theory, G. N. Vorontsova, A. M. Mukhin among them, maintain that what is traditionally treated as the inflectional genitive case form is actually a combination of the noun with a postposition denoting possession. The main arguments to support this point of view are as follows: first, the postpositional element ‘s is not only used with words, but also with the units larger than the word, with word-combinations and even sentences, e.g.: his daughter Mary’s arrival, the man I saw yesterday’s face; it may be used with no noun at all, but with a pronoun, e.g.: somebody else’s car; second, the same meaning of possession is rendered in English by prepositional of-phrases, e.g.: this man’s daughter – the daughter of this man. The followers of this approach conclude that –s is no longer an inflection, but a particle-like postpositional word, so, “noun +–‘s” is not a morphological form of the noun, but a purely syntactical construction and there is no longer a morphological category of case in English.

3) The approach which can be defined as “the theory of limited case” is the most widely accepted theory of case in English today. It was formulated by linguists H. Sweet, O. Jespersen and further developed by Russian linguists A. Smirnitsky, L. Barchudarov and others. It is based on the oppositional presentation of the category; the category of case is expressed by the opposition of two forms: the first form, “the genitive case”, is the strong, featured member of the opposition, marked by the postpositional element ‘–s’ after an apostrophe in the singular and just an apostrophe in the plural, e.g.: the girl’s books, the girls’ books; the second, unfeatured  form is the weak member of the opposition and is usually referred to as “the common case”  (“non-genitive”).

The category of gender in English is a highly controversial subject. Some linguists claim that, since there are no formal gender marks of nouns, there is no grammatical category of gender in modern English. They maintain that in modern English, the biological division of masculine and feminine genders is rendered only by lexical means: special words and lexical affixes, e.g.: man – woman, tiger – tigress, he-goat – she-goat, male nurse, etc.

In English gender is a meaningful category for the whole class of the nouns, because it reflects the real gender attributes (or their absence/ irrelevance) of the referent denoted. It is realized through obligatory correspondence of every noun with the 3rd person singular pronouns - he, she, or it: man – he, woman – she, tree, dog – it. Personal pronouns are grammatical gender classifiers in English. Gender is a constant feature category: each noun belongs to only one of the three genders. In addition, there is a group of nouns in English which can denote either a female or a male in different contexts; these nouns can be substituted by either ‘he’ or ‘she’, e.g.: president, professor, friend, etc. They constitute a separate group of nouns – the common gender nouns. For them the category of gender is a variable feature category. For countable nouns the category of number is a variable feature category, since countable English nouns have both singular and plural correlative forms (table – tables). Uncountable nouns can be used either only in the singular or only in the plural; for them the category of number is absolute, or a constant feature category. The two groups of uncountable nouns are respectively defined as singularia tantum and pluralia tantum. Singularia tantum nouns usually denote the following referents: abstract notions – love, hate, despair, etc.; names of substances and materials – snow, wine, sugar, etc.; branches of professional activity – politics, linguistics, mathematics; some collective objects – fruit, machinery, etc. There are some other singularia tantum nouns, that are difficult to classify, e.g., advice, news and others. Pluralia tantum nouns usually denote the following: objects consisting of two halves – scissors, trousers, spectacles, etc.; some diseases and abnormal states – mumps, measles, creeps, hysterics, etc.; indefinite plurality, collective referents – earnings, police, cattle, etc. The nouns belonging to the pluralia tantum group are used with verbs in the plural; they cannot be combined with numerals, and their quantity is rendered by special lexical quantifiers a pair of, a case of, etc., e.g.: a pair of trousers, several cases of measles, etc.

The category of number is expressed by the paradigmatic opposition of two forms: the singular and the plural. The strong member in this opposition, the plural, is marked by special formal marks, the main of which is the productive suffix –(e)s. The grammatical meaning of the singular is traditionally defined in a simplified way as “one”, and the meaning of the plural – as “many (more than one)”. But the noun in the singular can denote not only “one discrete separate object”, but also substances (water), abstract notions (love), units of measure (hour) and other referents. The same applies to the meaning of the plural: plural forms do not always denote “more than one object”, but express some other meanings, such as feelings (horrors of war), sorts of substances (wines), picturesqueness (sands, waters), etc.