11.Noun: The category of case. Peculiarities of the genitive case in English.

In present-day linguistics case is used in two senses: 1) semantic, or logic, and 2) syntactic. The semantic case concept was developed by C. J. Fillmore in the late 1960s. Ch. Fillmore introduced syntactic-semantic classification of cases. According to him, verbs may stand to different relations to nouns. There are 6 cases: 1. Agentive Case (A) John opened the door; 2. Instrumental case (I) The key opened the door; John used the key to open the door; 3. Dative Case (D) John believed that he would win (the case of the animate being affected by the state of action identified by the verb); 4. Factitive Case (F) The key was damaged (the result of the action or state identified by the verb); 5. Locative Case (L) Chicago is windy; 6. Objective case (O) John stole the book. The syntactic case concept dates back to the grammars of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. It is a case whose main role is to indicate a relationship between constituents. Thus genitive is a case which marks one noun as dependent on another, e.g. John’s car. Prescriptivists spoke of the nominative, the dative, the genitive, the accusative, and the ablative. The English genitive is not a classical case. Its peculiarities are: 1) the inflection -‘s is but loosely connected with the noun (e.g. the Queen of England’s daughter; the man I met yesterday’s son); 2) genitive constructions are paralleled by corresponding prepositional constructions (e.g. Shakespeare’s works vs. the works of Shakespeare); 3) the use of the genitive is mainly limited to nouns denoting living beings; 4) the inflection -‘s is used both in the singular and in the plural (e.g. a boy’s bicycle vs. the boys’ bicycles), which is not typical of case inflexions.

12. Noun: The problem of gender. Ways of expressing gender distinctions in English.

In Indo-European languages the category of gender is presented with flexions.According to some language analysts, nouns have no category of gender in Modern English. Prof. Ilyish states that not a single word in Modern English shows any peculiarities in its morphology due to its denoting male or female being. Thus, the words husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to peculiarities of their lexical meaning. It correlates with gender only when sex differences of living beings are manifested in the language grammatically (e.g. tiger – tigress).

Gender distinctions in English are marked for a limited number of nouns. In present-day English there are some morphemes which present differences between masculine and feminine (waiter – waitress, widow – widower). The morpheme on which the distinction between masculine and feminine is based in English is a word- building morpheme, not form-building. Prof. Blokh states that the existence of the category of gender in Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns of the third person (he, she, it). Accordingly, there are three genders in English: the neuter (non-person) gender, the masculine gender, the feminine gender.

13.The linguistic status of the article. In English we have three articles - the, a/an, ø. The articles, according to some linguists, do not form a grammatical category. The articles, they argue, do not belong to the same lexeme, and they do not have meaning common to them: a/an has the meaning of oneness, not found in the, which has a demonstrative meaning. Linguists are only agreed on the function of the article: the article is a determiner, or a restricter. The linguistic status of the article reminds us of the status of shall/will in I shall/will go. Both of the structures are still felt to be semantically related to their ‘parent’ structures: the numeral one and the demonstrative that (O.E. se) and the modals shall and will, respectively. In contrast to countables, restricted uncountables are used with two indefinite articles: a/an and zero. The role of the indefinite article is to individuate a subamount of the entity which is presented here as an aspect (type, sort) of the entity.