Check yourself test 3

1. What morphological means is used to denote the seme of possession?

2. Enumerate the basic semantic types of the genitive case in English.

Genitive can be:

1. subjective (e.g. my father’s arrival);

2. objective (e.g. Doughty’s famous trial and execution);

3. possessive (e.g. officer’s cap – belonging to the officer  фуражка офицера)

4. qualitative ( e.g. officer’s cap – worn by an officer  офицерская фуражка);

Seminar 4

The English noun The category of gender

1. The problem of the category of gender.

In ME so-called gender depends entirely upon sex: English long ago lost the “grammatical gender” that is still found in French and German and nearly all other languages. In these languages gender is interdependent of sex, and for the purposes of syntax it is important to know whether the word is masculine or feminine. No such importance attaches to the “gender” of English nouns, though inflexions like lion, lioness are to be noted.

Blokh:

The category of gender is expressed in English by the obligatory correlation of nouns with the personal pronouns of the 3^rd person.

• Person: masculine/feminine;

• Non-person: neuter.

The category of gender is strictly oppositional. It is formed by 2 oppositions related to each other on a hierarchical basis.

Double oppositional correlation:

Person VS non-person

Masculine vs feminine

 a specific system of 3 genders arises: neuter non-person; (+) feminine person, (-) masculine person.

The strong member (marked) of the upper opposition is the human subclass of nouns, its sememic mark being “person”, “personality”. The weak member of the opposition includes both inanimate and animate non-person nouns.

The strong member of the lower opposition is the feminine subclass of person nouns.

Gender
Person Nouns		Non-person nouns
Feminine Nouns	Masculine Nouns

A great number of person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine person genders by the way of pronominal correlation in questions. They are referred to as nouns of the “common gender” (e.g. person, president, parent, friend, cousin, doctor).

Alongside the demonstrated grammatical gender distinctions, English nouns can show the sex of their referents lexically, either by means of being combined with certain notional words used as sex indicators, or by suffixal derivation (e.g. boy-friend, girl-friend, landlord, landlady, cock-sparrow, hen-sparrow, he-bear, she-bear, lion, lioness). Still, all the referents of such nouns, denoting not human beings are represented by “it”.

When they turn into “he” and “she” we can speak of a grammatical personifying transposition, which is very typical of English. This kind of transposition affects not only animate nouns, but also a wide range of inanimate nouns.

Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов:

The category of case in English has totally disappeared in the end of the Middle English epoch. The biological sex is expressed only lexically or with the help of inflexions. They strongly oppose the view that each noun can be substituted by a corresponding personal pronoun, which shows its biological gender sex, because it is impossible to transfer the feature of one part of speech to another part of speech. What’s more, gender of the English personal pronouns is also only lexical, but not grammatical.

2. The category of number of English nouns.

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.

1. Some few word (of Germanic origin) from their plural:

1. by adding –en to the singular (e.g. ox/oxen, child/children)

2. by a change of vowel (e.g. mouse/mice, goose/geese)

3. without change (e.g. sheep, swine)

2. all other words add –s or –es to the singular (e.g. boy/boys)

3. some words directly borrowed from other languages retain their original plural form:

Greek: phenomenon/phenomena.

Latin: axis/axes, formula/formulae, genius/genii, index/indices.

Hebrew: cherub/cherubim, seraph/seraphim.

Italian: bandit/banditti, dilettante/dilettanti.

French: beau/beaux, portmanteau/portmanteaux.

Хаймович/Роговская:

The category of number of English is the system of opposemes (e.g. girl-girls, foot-feet).

All number opposemes are identical in content: they contain 2 particular meanings of “singular” and “plural” united by the general meaning of the category of number. But there is a considerable variety of form in number opposemes, though it is not so great as in the Russian language.

Boy-boys: singularity is expressed by zero-morpheme and plurality is marked by the positive morpheme –s  singular is not marked, the plural is marked.

Phenomenon-phenomena: both are marked.

Ilyish:

Pluralia Tantum (e.g. trousers, scissors, tongs (щипцы), pincers (клещи), breeches, environs (окрестности), outskirts, dregs (отбросы), mathematics, phonetics, measles, mumps) and Singularia Tantum (e.g. milk, butter, quicksilver, peace).

Collective nouns and nouns of multitude. Certain nouns denoting groups of human beings (e.g. family, government, clergy) and also of animals (e.g. cattle, poultry) 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 singulars, and usually termed “collective nouns” (e.g. My family is small); or else they are taken to denote the group as consisting of a certain number of individual human beings (or animals), and in that case they are usually termed “nouns of multitude” (e.g. My family are good speakers).

A.Isachenko:

The essential meanings of the category is not that of quantity, but of discreteness (расчленённость)  the plural expresses fundamentally the notion of something consisting of distinguishable parts, and the meaning of quantity in the usual sense would then appear to be a result of combining the fundamental meaning of the category as such with the lexical meaning of the noun used in the plural (e.g. scissors – an object consisting of 2 parts).

3. Grammatical number and lexical meaning of nouns compared.

Blokh:

The semantic nature of the difference between singular and plural may present some difficulties of interpretation.

Tear – tears

Potato – potatoes

Paper – papers

Sky – skies

The broader semantic mark of the plural should be described as the potentially dismembering reflection of the structure of the referent, while the sememic mark of the singular will be understood as the non-dismembering reflection of the structure of the referent, i.e. the presentation of the referent in its indivisible entireness.

It is sometimes stated that the plural form indiscriminately presents both multiplicity of separate objects and multiplicity of units of measure for an indivisible object (e.g. three houses – three hours).

A.Isachenko (from Ilyish’s book):

The essential meanings of the category is not that of quantity, but of discreteness (расчленённость)  the plural expresses fundamentally the notion of something consisting of distinguishable parts, and the meaning of quantity in the usual sense would then appear to be a result of combining the fundamental meaning of the category as such with the lexical meaning of the noun used in the plural (e.g. scissors – an object consisting of 2 parts).

There are semantic varieties of the plural forms that differ from one another in their plural quality as such.

• the plural form expresses a definite set of objects: (eyes of the face, wheels of the vehicle)

• various types of the referent (wines, tees, steels)

• intensity of the presentation of the idea (years and years, thousands upon thousands)

• picturesqueness (sands, waters, snows)

 Lexicalization of the Plural form.

4. Lexicalization of plural forms.

* Ilyish: Between the Sg & the Pl an additional difference of meaning has developed  the plural form develops a completely new meaning which the singular has not got at all (e.g. colour/colours)- the plural form has been lexicalized.