Questions to be discussed:

1. What are the “part of speech” properties of a noun?

2. Why don’t lexical gender markers annul the grammatical character of English gender?

3. Why is the interpretation of the categorial meaning of the nounal plural form as “more than one” considered not well-grounded?

4. What makes the category of case in English disputable?

5. What are the strong and weak points of the “prepositional”, “positional”, and “postpositional” case theories?

6. What ensures a peculiar status of “-s”?

EXERCISES

I. Define the casal semantics of the modifying component in the underlined phrases and account for their determination.

a)

1. Two Negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one sees in pictures of royal processions in London, were standing at attention beside the car and as the two young men dismounted from the buggy they greeted in some language which the guest could not understand, but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern Negro’s dialect (Fitzgerald).

2. Home was a fine high-ceiling apartment hewn from the palace of a Renaissance cardinal in the Rue Monsieur – the sort of thing Henry could not have afforded in America (Fitzgerald).

3. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs (O.Henry).

4. The two vivid years of his love for Caroline moved back around him like years in Einstein’s physics (Fitzgerald).

5. “Isn’t Ida’s head a dead ringer for the lady’s head on the silver dollar?” (O. Henry)

6. He had been away from New York for more than eight months and most of the dance music was unfamiliar to him, but at the first bars of the “Painted Doll”, to which he and Caroline had moved through so much happiness and despair the previous summer, he crossed to Caroline’s table and asked her to dance (Fitzgerald).

b)

1. And then followed the big city’s biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker…handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity – the Hue and Cry (O. Henry).

2. He mentioned what he had said to the aspiring young actress who had stopped him in front of Sardi’s and asked quite bluntly if she should persist in her ambition to go on the stage or give up and go home (Saroyan).

3. The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law’s minions (O.Henry).

4. I’ve heard you’re very fat these days, but I know it’s nothing serious, and anyhow I don’t care what happens to people’s bodies, just so the rest of them is O. K. (Saroyan)

5. “I dropped them flowers in a cracker-barrel, and let the news trickle in my ears and down toward my upper left-hand shirt pocket until it got to my feet.” (O. Henry)

6. She turned and smiled at him unhappily in the dim dashboard light (Cheever).

c)

1. Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the hotel clerk we gave that plan up. He told us that there was only one way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady lobbyist (O.Henry)

2. Nobody lived in the old Parker mansion, and the driveway was used as a lover’s lane (Cheever).

3. His eyes were the same blue shade as the china dog’s in the right-hand corner of your Aunt Ellen’s mantelpiece (O. Henry)

4. Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms (Thurber).

5. “A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice (O. Henry)

6. Then he would spring onto the terrace, lift the steak lightly off the fire, and run away with the Goslins’ dinner. Jupiter’s days were numbered. The Wrightson’s German gardener or the Farquarson’s cook would soon poison him (Cheever).

d)

1. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp (O. Henry)

2. One day this man finds his wife putting on her overshoes and three months’ supply of bird seed into the canary’s cage (O. Henry).

3. After leaving Pinky, Francis went to a jeweller’s and bought the girl a bracelet (Cheever).

4. And Mr. Binkley looked imposing and dashing with the red face and grey moustache, and his tight dress coat, that made the back of his neck roll up just like a successful novelist’s (Cheever).

5. He broke up garden parties and tennis matches, and got mixed up in the processional at Christ’s Church on Sunday, barking at the men in red dresses (Cheever).

6. I painted the portrait of a very beautiful and popular society dame (O.Henry)