The Noun

The noun is the main nominative part of speech, having the categorial meaning of “substance” and “thingness”.

The noun is characterized by a set of formal features. It has its word-building distinctions, including typical suffixes, compound stem models, conversion patterns.

It has the grammatical categories of gender, number, case, article determination.

The most characteristic function of the noun is that of the subject in the sentence. The function of the object in the sentence is also typical of the noun. Other syntactic functions, i.e. attribute, adverbial and even predicative are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality.

The noun is characterized by some special types of combinability. It is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.

E.g. an entrance to the house;

to turn round the corner;

red in the face;

far from its destination.

The casal combinability characterizes the noun alongside of its prepositional combinability with another noun.

E.g. the speech of the President - the president's speech.

English nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact. In the contact group the noun in pre-position plays the role of a semantic qualifier to the noun in post-position. E.g. film festivals, a cannon ball.

The lexico-grammatical status of such combinations has been a big problem for many scholars, who were uncertain as to how to treat this combination: either as one separate compound word or a word-group.

In the history of linguistics it is called “The cannon ball problem” (or the stone wall problem).

Category of number

The category of number is expressed by the opposition of the plural form of the noun and to the singular form of the noun. The strong member of this binary opposition is the plural, its productive formal mark is the suffix -(e)s [z,s,iz].

The non-productive ways of expressing the number opposition are vowel interchange in several relict forms, the archaic suffix -(e)n supported by phonemic interchange (child - children), the correlation of individual singular and plural suffixes in a limited number of borrowed nouns (datum - data).

In spoken English the productive allomorphs es,s are often used instead of the borrowed ones in formulas, sanatoriums, memorandums.

In some cases the plural form of the noun is homonymous with the singular form (sheep). Semantically, the meaning of the singular is “one”, as opposed to the meaning of the plural 'many', or “more than one”. It shows whether the noun stands for one object or more than one.

However language facts are not always so simple as that. Sometimes the singular form does not express singularity, i.e. one object, e.g. a fleet, a family, a crew, etc, or the plural form does not mean many objects (scissors, brains, etc).

A peculiar view of the category of number was put forward by A. Isachenko. According to this view, the essential meaning of the category of number of the noun is not that of quantity, but of discreteness (расчлененность).

Thus in “scissors” the category of plural number expresses discreteness and combines with the lexical meaning of the noun, which denotes an object consisting of two halves.

Thus, the grammatical category of number is closely connected with the lexical meaning of the noun. The real meaning of the noun becomes clear only syntagmatically, e.g. My family is large. My family are all early risers.

Some plural forms of English nouns undergo lexicalization. E.g. colours - знамя (flag), pains - effort, quarters - abode.

Some plural forms are used for stylistic purposes (sands, waters, snows), which do not mean plurality, but great expanses.

The nounal vocabulary is divided into countable nouns and uncountable nouns. Countable nouns generally comprise class nouns (конкретные), collective nouns (army), abstract concrete nouns (ideas, thoughts, joys) and nouns having one form for the singular and plural (sheep, deer).

The two subclasses of uncountable nouns are usually referred to as singularia tantum (only singular) and pluralia tantum (only plural). Singularia tantum is characteristic of the names of abstract notions (peace, love, joy, news, weather, courage, progress, friendship, etc), the names of the branches of professional activity (chemistry, architecture, mathematics, linguistics, etc), the names of mass materials (water, snow, steel, hair, etc), the names of collective inanimate objects (foliage, fruit, furniture, machinery, etc).

Some of these words can be used in the form of the common singular with the common plural counterpart (противная сторона, двойник), but in this case they mean either different sorts of materials, or separate concrete manifestations of the qualities denoted by abstract nouns, or concrete objects showing the respective qualities.

E.g. steel- steels; a joy - joys; a fish – fishes

He studeis freshwater fishes (sorts).

She eats much fish (material).

I caught many fish.

a hair - hairs (волы);

a youth - youths (юноша).

So a variant of a class noun may belong to the singularia tantum. Singularia tantum may be combined with words showing discreteness, such as bit, piece, item, sort.

The pluralia tantum is characteristic of the uncountable nouns which denote objects consisting of two halves (trousers, scissors, tongs, spectacles, etc); the nouns expressing some sort of collective meaning (clothes, goods, earnings, wages, ourskirts, politics, contents, police, cattle, poultry); the nouns denoting some diseases and some abnormal states of the body and mind (measles - корь, rickets - рахит, mumps - свинка, creeps - мурашки, hysterics).

The pluralia tantum may be combined with such words as pair, set, group, bunch. So a variant of a class noun may belong to the pluralia tantum: e.g. a custom - customs; customs – таможня; a colour - colours; colours – знамя. Such variants may be considered as different nouns.