Isomorphic Semantic Groups of Singularia Tantum Nouns
The category of case. Case shows relation of words in the sentence expressed by morphological forms of a certain nominal part of speech. English nouns have only two cases – the common case (the uninflected form) and the possessive case (the 's inflected form). In very many cases the relations of nouns in the sentence in English are expressed by prepositional groups, that's the common case of the uninflected form of the noun preceded by the proposition with (him), of (my father), by etc. Such relations are also expressed by the word order. We can surely pronounce the case system of the English noun as very poor, not only because there are only two cases (as compared with 6-7 cases in Ukr), but also because of the restrictive use of the possessive case. It is mostly used only with nouns denoting living beings. Moreover, with these nouns we can almost freely use the of-phrase instead. E.g. my father's house, the house of my father. The term possessive is not quite a good one, because this form expresses many more things thn possession. Thus, grammarians distinguish between subjective genitive (Peter's writing – means 'Peter writes) and objective genitive (Peter's expelling from the university – Peter was expelled by somebody). Group possessive. Contrary to the Ukrainian language in which the 's sign of case is related to only one word, in English the 's sign may be related to more than one word – to a whole group of words. E.g. Mary and Ann's room, the man over there's dog. Such practice in English is called group possessive. The scholars suppose that this possessive case has undergone the process of syntaxicalization: the 's sign separated form the stem and modifies word combinations has turned into a syntactic marker . The category of Gender. No identity exists in the contrasted languages in the expression of the category of gender. In a language the category of gender must be strictly oppositional. The classical gender opposition contains 3 members: masculine gender, feminine and neutral gender. The morphological category of gender in Ukrainian is identified either through separate inflexions of the adjunct/attribute or through the inflexion of the finite form of the verb that conjugates with a noun. For example:
The morphological category of gender and the objective (natural) category of sex may also be indicated in Ukrainian by the following means: a) by a marked inflexion in the nominative case (батько, мати, сестра); b) by the zero inflexion (дуб, час, ніч); с) by suffixes only or by the root suffixes + endings (робітник, вівчар, вчительк-a); d) by means of a modifying word: наше київське метро, цей кабальєро, ця молода леді/дама, etc.
|