IV. Comment on the oppositional reduction of the categorial nounal forms: a) the category of number

1. Yet, every dim little star revolving around her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices... (Dickens)

2. There's many a poor respectable mother who doesn't get half the fussing and attention which is lavished on some of these girls! (James)

3. But Hamilton drinks too much and all this crowd of young people drink too much (Fitzgerald).

4. He won't be retiring for another eighteen months (Christie).

5. In her grace, at once exquisite and hardy, she was that perfect type of American girl that makes one wonder if the male is not being sacrificed to it, much as, in the last century, the lower strata in England were sacrificed to produce the governing class (Fitzgerald).

6. Michael saw Mrs. Dandy, not quite over her illness, rise to go and become caught in polite group after group (Fitzgerald).

7. While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill. "That bastard crosses there every night," the man said. "Every night for two weeks." "He's the one makes the noise at night. I don't mind it. They are a filthy animal though." (Hemingway)

8. He opened a second window and got into bed to shut his eyes on that night, but as soon as they were shut - as soon as he had dropped off to sleep - the girl entered his mind, moving with perfect freedom through its shut doors and filling chamber after chamber with her light, her perfume, and the music of her voice (Cheever).

9. "Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a woman." (Anderson)

10. What does a man risk his life day after day for? (O. Henry)

b) the category of case

1. The car speed was so slow that it seemed to be crawling (Cheever).

2. Music's voice went to his heart (O.Henry).

3. The hearth was swept, the roses on the piano were reflected in the polish of the broad top, and there was an album of Schubert waltzes on the rack (Cheever).

4. He remembered reading - in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought that every modern motel room in America seems filled with mirrors (King).

5. And I expect the whole place is bugged, and everybody knows everybody else's most secret conversations (Christie).

c) the category of gender

1. The old man was soon asleep and dreamed of the ocean and his golden beaches (Hemingway).

2. The moon was rising, blood-red. The boy was looking at her thinking that he had never seen so red a moon (Galsworthy).

3. She shuddered. The child, his own child, was only an "it" to him (Lawrence).

4. When Alice was speaking to the Mouse, she noticed that he was trembling all over with fright (Carroll).

5. I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquita; and then the wool entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me. I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat (O. Henry).

6. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers (O. Henry).