The noun as a part of speech

1. semantic mg- N- wds which express thingness or substantivity, i.e substances (objects, persons) or qualities of substances. 2. formal charact- The N has 2 gramm categ- number and case, it may be represented by binary opposition: boy0-boys(marked member), John- John’s. E N. has no gramm gender as well as not a single N shows any pecularities in it’s morphology due to its denoting male/female being (husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to the pecul. Of lexical meanings). The paradigm of e.N consist of 4 members: boy-boys-boy’s-boys’. 3. Syntactical characteristics of N: on the phrase level N can be defined by article, pronoun, adj, prep+N. on the sentence level – subject, object, adv mod, attrib, predicative, part of C.N.P. According to ahmanova there can be 4 criteria: wd building suffixes (er, or, ness, dom, hood, ship).

Semantic classification of N:

a)proper

-animate

-inanimate

b)common

countable

-class(animate, inanimate)

-collective(animate, inanimate, multitude)

uncountable

-material

-abstract

Case- category of a N expressing relations btw the thing denoted by N and other things or properties or actions manifested by some formal sign in the noun itself. This sign is an inflection or a zero sign. The usual point of view: E noun has 2 cases (common case- father and genitive case- father’s) Common case is expressed by zero morpheme and genitive case by morpheme which has 4 allomorphs (s,z,iz,0).

The meaning of genitive case are subjective (when it corresponds to the sentence where 1st wd will be the subject= my father’s arrival, his son’s return); objective (= Daniel’s trial - corresponds to the person who trialed Daniel); relation btw a part and the whole (= the young man’s face); qualitative mg (an officer’s cap- a cap worn by an officer).

But there are some other points of view:

1. there are more than 2 cases in E (Curm and Deutshbein)

2. there are no cases at all in E.(Voronzova).

In the first some west European scholars think that there are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, where gen is expressed by –‘s inflection, and by preposit “of”, dative- by prep “to” and also by wd order, accusative is by wd order alone (i saw a man, the man saw me). This point of view (Curm, Deutschbein) is open for criticism.

The combination prep+N can not be treated as case forms cause prep are not aux wds of their own. If we accept their opinion then the number of cases will grow, and thus “in the room” will be locative case.

The second point of view there are no cases at all – the reasons to this point are: not all EN may take their inflections, but mainly animate N are used in this case. ‘s may be added not only to Ns but also to other PSAdv, Pron, N. (it’s nobody else’s business); not only separate wds but also whole groups may take this inflection (‘s) (the man I saw yesterday’s son). Some believe that ‘s is not a case form. This opinion is expressed by prof. Vorontsova. She wrote an article “Об именном форманте ‘s в англ языке” Not all engl Ns may take this inflexion – only animate.

‘s may be added not only to Ns, but also to other parts of speech, such as pron, numerals so why should we consider it a N case form? *Yesterday’s newspaper*

‘s may be added not only to separate wds, but also to whole groups. *The man I saw yesterday’s son. King of England’s residence. The blond I had been dancing with’s name was…*

So ‘s characterizes the whole phrase & serves as an attribute. It is a whole syntactical element expressing possession.

Professors Shteling & Barhudarov share this opinion & call ‘s *a possessive element building a possessive construction”