Bibliography

The category of number

Of English nouns

Daria Menshikova

 

Department of Scientific and Technical Translation and professional communication, MP21

S.V. Shelkovnikova

17.12.12

Contents

 

Introduction

- The definition of a Noun

2. What is Noun?

- Earliest definitions of a Noun

 

The category of number of English nouns

- Expression and role of the category of number in English grammar

- Morphemic and lexemic expression

- Singularia tantum and pluralia tantum, or singular and plural nouns

 

- Collective noun

- The semantic look on singular and plural nouns

- The sphere of plural

Conclusion

Bibliography

 

 

 

Introduction
The noun is a word expressing substance in the widest sense of the word. In the concept of substance we include not only names of living beings (e.g. boy, girl, bird) and lifeless things (e.g. table, chair, book), but also names of abstract notions, i.e. qualities, slates, actions (kindness, strength, sleep, fear, conversation, fight), abstracted from their bearers. In speech these types of nouns are treated in different ways, so one, who does not know ways of treatment, can make mistakes in his speech.

1. What is Noun?
The word «noun» comes from the Latin nomen meaning «name». Word classes like nouns were first described by Sanskrit grammarian Panini and ancient Greeks like Dionysius Thorax, and defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greece, nouns can be inflected for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative. Aristotle also had a notion of onomata (nouns) and rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly correspond our notions of verbs and nouns.

 

The definition of nouns on the top of this page is thus a formal definition. That definition is uncontroversial, and has the advantage that it allows us to effectively distinguish nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns by means of those. There are also several attempts of defining nouns in terms of their semantic properties.