VII. Noun. The general description

Noun as a part of speech has the categorial meaning of substance. Substantivity is grammatical meaning which allows both names of things and not names of things (abstract notions, activities, properties etc) to function syntactically as names of things. Not all the nouns, derived from other parts of speech, have the morphological categories of noun. Not all the nouns meet every criterion (see the previous lecture), but they belong to the field structure of noun.

The semantic properties of the noun determine its categorial syntactic properties: the primary substantive functions of the noun are those of the subject and the object. Its other functions are predicative (she is a singer), attributive (the stone wall), which can be treated as turning of the noun into an adjective, which is proved by the fact, that these words lose the category of number) and adverbial (in the room).

The syntactic properties of the noun are also revealed in its special types of combinability. In particular, the noun is characterized by the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.

As a part of speech the noun has a set of formal features: specific word-building suffixes, which serves as the only criterion for their belonging to this part of speech. Two groups of nouns have mostly suffixal structure: persons and abstracts: er, ist, ess are the person suffixes; ness, ion, ation, ition, ity, ism, ance, ment are abstract (singer, naturalist, actress, darkness, attention, movement). The vast majority of nouns are one-syllable words, in which the root coincides with the stem and the word.

The noun discriminates 4 grammatical categories: the cat. of gender, number, case and article determination, out of which only number is undoubtful.

The formal features taken together are relevant for the division of nouns into several subclasses, grouped into four oppositional pairs.

Proper-common – “type of nomination”, animate-inanimate – “type of existence”, human-non-human – “personal quality”, countable-uncountable – “quantitative structure”. Also there is an opposition of concrete and abstract nouns. (friend-friendship)

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

1. substantivity – вещественость

2. predicative – именная часть сказуемого

3. attribute - определение

4. one-syllable - односложный

5. gender - род

6. number - число

7. case - падеж

8. article determination - определённость

9. proper/common – собственные/нарицательные

10. animate/inanimate – одушевленные/неодушевленные

11. human/non-human – названия людей/прочие названия