1. Grammar as a science. Its aim and objects.

The term “grammar” goes back to a Greek word that may be translated as the “art of writing”. But later this word acquired a much wider sense and came to embrace the whole study of language. Now it is often used as the synonym of linguistics.

Grammar may be practical and theoretical. The aim of practical grammar is the description of grammar rules that are necessary to understand and formulate sentences. The aim of theoretical grammar is to offer explanation for these rules. Generally speaking, theoretical grammar deals with the language as a functional system.

Grammar is a field of linguistics that involves all the various things that make up the rules of language. Subfields of linguistics that are considered a part of this field include syntax, phonetics, morphology, and semantics. Grammar is also used as a term to refer to the prescriptive rules of a given language, which may change over time or be open to debate.

The nature of grammar is better understood in the light of discriminating the two planes of language - the plane of content and the plane of expression. The plane of content comprises the purely semantic elements contained in language; the plane of expression comprises the material (formal) units of language taken by themselves.

The two planes are inseparably connected. Grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression, or a unity of form and meaning.

Language is a system of signs (meaningful units) which are closely interconnected and interdependent.

Speech is the manifestation of the system of the lan-ge in process of intercourse. Language and speech are inseparable, they form together an organic unity.

E.g. For some reason Dill started crying and couldn’t stop (content).

She started to cry again (plane of expression).

So, the aim of theoretical grammar of a language is to present a theoretical description of its grammatical system, i.e. to scientifically analyze and define its grammatical categories and study the mechanisms of grammatical formation of utterances out of words in the process of speech making.

Today grammar is considered to be a system of contact connections both of morphemes (as the smallest meaningful units within the word) and sentences (as the largest meaningful units) within the speech complexes. That is why grammar is limited by the spheres of morphemes, words, sentences and speech complexes.

2. The Noun and its characteristic features as a part of speech.

Nouns are a part of speech typically denoting a person, place, thing, animal or idea. In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.^[1]

Lexical categories are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they are subject (classed by gender, inflected for case and number). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since nouns do not have the same categories in all languages.

Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties (their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.^[6]

Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other lexical categories) in terms of their formal properties. These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their syntax – how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types. Such definitions may nonetheless still be language-specific, since syntax as well as morphology varies between languages. For example, in English it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as stated at the start of this article), but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.

In Modern English we can see the following system of parts of speech:

I Noun or substantive Its characteristic features are such:

1. Meaning: thingness (includes everything as a thing or object)- chair, table, beauty, peace, journey, etc.

2. Form: nouns have the category of number (singular and plural) and the category of case (common and genitive)

3. Function: a) combining with words to form phrases e.g. large room, children play

b) in the sentence noun can be the subject, the predicative, an adverbial modifier, an object, an attribute.