4. Grammatical category of gender

Traditionally, gender is defined as a morphological category which finds its expression in special noun inflections of gender. There is no unity of opinion concerning the category of gender in Modern English. Old English nouns distinguish three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Henry Sweet finds the same three genders in Modern English.

Criticizing the conception of H. Sweet, Smirnitsky emphasizes that in Modern English it's not nouns, but the things they denote that are classified into the so-called gender. For instance, there is no formal difference between the nouns 'boy' and 'girl', but the noun 'boy' is considered to belong to the masculine gender, the noun 'girl' - to the feminine gender because they denote male and female beings respectively. In other words, gender in Modern English nouns is expressed lexically - by means of different words. We sometimes find three separate words, one common to both sexes, one - for the male, and one - for the female,

E.g. child, son, daughter

In other cases we have two separate words, one - for the male and one - for the female,

E.g. uncle, aunt

Finally, we have a great many words for living beings which do not indicate sex,

E.g. cousin, friend, enemy

When a special indication of sex is wanted, this can always be done by adding a word denoting sex,

E.g. boyfriend, girlfriend; tomcat, pussycat

Sometimes a female word is derived from the male word with the help of the suffix -ess,

E.g. actor - actress, waiter - waitress

Ganshina, Vasilevskaya, Kaushanskaya and Kovner and some other linguists refer this suffix to a gender forming suffix. According to Smirnitsky, suffix -ess should be treated not as a form building, but as a word-building suffix. Otto Jespersen defines gender not as a morphological, but as a syntactic category because it finds its expression in grammatical agreement. In the opinion of Otto Jespersen when there is no agreement (согласование), gender disappears. The loss of inflections which began in the Middle English period resulted in an almost complete disappearance of argument. Gender in Modern English is expressed neither morphologically, i.e. by special inflections of gender, nor syntactically, i.e. by forms of agreement. Gender in Modern English is a purely lexical category.

Determiners

1. The definition of the article

2. Functions of articles

3. The category of determinedness and indeterminedness

1. The definition of the article

The articles belong to a syntactic class of words called determiners, which modify a noun. According to Owen Thomas in 1967, there are three subclasses of determiners: regular, post-determiners, and pre-determiners. The subclass of regular determiner includes articles demonstratives and genitives.

There are two features that distinguish determiners from other words in a noun phrase (a word group consisting of a noun and its modifier):

1) Only one determiner can be used in a noun phrase, which means that determiners are reciprocal exclusive;

2) A determiner with very few exceptions comes first in a noun phrase,

E.g. a beautiful red rose, some new books, his new black suit

With respect to the articles, we must state, in the first place, that there are languages which have no article. Besides Russian and most other Slavonic languages, the Latin language belongs here. Ancient Greek has only one article - the definite one. Many languages (Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, etc.) have two articles - the definite and indefinite. As far as its forms it concerned the article is usually a separate unit, which may be divided from its noun by other words, chiefly adjectives. However, in certain languages the article may also be a morpheme, attached to the noun as a kind of suffix. This is in case, for instance, Romanian, Bulgarian and Swedish.

There are two material articles in English: the definite article and the indefinite article. The absence of the article before a noun is also meaningful. The meaningful absence of the article is called the zero article. The indefinite article (a, an) is derived from the numeral 'one' (oe (an)) and retains some of its earlier meaning. It occurs only before singular nouns,

E.g. Peter started life as a schoolmaster.

The definite has developed from the Old English demonstrative pronoun (se). The demonstrative noun meaning is clearly felt in Modern English,

E.g. The screenplay (this screenplay) is based on the novel.