3. The noun

Meaning: thingness. Form. Nouns have the category of number (singular and plural); some nouns may lack either a singular or a plural form. Nouns have the category of case (common & genitive). Function in the sentence: it may be the subject or the predicative of a sentence, or an object, an attribute, an adverbial modifier.

A noun is said to be in the singular number when it denotes one person or thing; it is said to be in the plural number when it denotes more than one person or thing.

ME distinguish between 2 numbers singular & plural. So the category of number is expressed by the binary private opposition. The strong member is the pl. and the weak member is the singular.

The productive ways of expressing the number is the morpheme –S. zero morpheme is used to express the singular. The other ways are: vowel interchange men-man; the archaic suffix en ox-oxen, and also individual singular and plural suffixes of borrowed nouns: formula-formulae. There are also cases of homonymy (fish-fish).

The semantic nature of the difference between singular and the plural presents difficulty of interpretation ex: three houses and three hours. Three houses-are three separate object and three hours are a continuous period of time as well as three miles, three acres. Here we distinguish “discrete plural” and “plural of measure”. There we’re to mention the process of lexicalization, the essence of which is developing a completely a new meaning of the noun in the plural ex:custom-customs.

The nouns which have only a plural form are termed - Pluralia Tantum. They include nouns of 2 types: 1. the noun which denote material objects consisting of 2 parts (trousers); 2. those which denote more or less indefinite plurality (premises). Close to these groups are also some names of sciences (physics,politics), names of diseases.

Nouns which have only a singular form –Singularia tantum. They are: nouns denoting material substance (milk,butter) & names of abstract notions (peace). Some nouns denoting substance or material may have a plural form if they used to denote an object made of the material or substance (iron-irons).

Certain nouns denoting groups of human beings and animals can be used in 2 different ways: either they are taken to denote the group as a whole and in that case they are treated as singular and termed as ‘collective nouns’; or else they are taken to denote the group as consisting of a certain number of individual human beings and termed nouns of multitude.

4. Segmental and supra-segmental units

Units of language are divided into segmental and supra-segmental. Segmental units consist of phonemes; they form phonemic units of various statuses (syllables, morphemes, words). Supra-segmental units do not exist by themselves, but work together with segmental units (accents, pauses, patterns of word order).

The segmental units form a hierarchy of levels. Professor Bloch M.Y. differentiates 6 levels:

1. Phonemic - the level of phonemes. Phoneme is not a sign, but a unit of a language, which has no meaning and serves as the material element of the higher –level segments.

2. Morphemic – the level of morphemes. Morpheme is a sign, as it has 2 sides; it is represented by a group of allophones and serves as an elementary meaningful part of speech, expresses the significative meaning. Morphemes are used as constituents of words. e.g. do – doing (progress); book – books (Pl)

3. Lexemic. Lexeme(a word) in a l-ge performs a nominative function, it names objects & phenomena. Sometimes 1 morpheme can be 1 word.

4. Phrasemic. Combinations of two or more notional words connected semantically. Functiont – polynominative. Phrases name complicated things & phenom, give add. information about qualities of objects, circumstances. Phrases: free (we can choose elements freely) & stable (phraseological units).

5. Proposemic - the level of the sentence. Functions: a) Nominative (it names a whole situation or a situational event) b) Predicative. Predication is the connection between the subject & the predicate of a s-ce, which form a predicative line.

6. Dictemic – level of topicalization. Unit – dicteme. A dicteme is a combination of 2 or more s-ces which are united by a common topic.

Areas lying between the levels: phonotactics (the sequences of phonemes); morphotactics (or the sequences of morphemes); logotactics (between the word and phrase (and clause)).

Two central notions within the framework of the structural hierarchy of language: 1). the notion of the word and 2). the notion of the sentence. The first one is the object of morphology and the second – of syntax.