Lecture 5 Noun: General Characteristics

The noun as a part of speech has the categorial meaning of “substance” or “thinness”. It follows from this that the noun is the main nominative part of speech. The noun has a power, by way of nomination, to isolate different properties of substances and present them as self-dependent substances:

e.g. Her words were unexpectedly bitter —> We were struck by the unexpected bitterness of her words.

This natural and practically unlimited substantivization force establishes the noun as the central nominative lexemic unit of language.

The functional properties of the noun are determined by its semantic properties. The most characteristic substantive function of the noun is that of the subject and that of the object. Other syntactic functions, i.e. attributive, adverbial, predicative, although performed by the noun with equal ease, are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality as such. But performing these non­substantive functions, the noun essentially differs from the other parts of speech used in similar sentence positions. This may be shown by the following transformation test shifting the noun from non-subject syntactic positions into subject syntactic position of the same general semantic value (which is impossible with other parts of speech). E.g.:

Mary is a flower-girl —► The flower-girl is Mary.

He lives in Glasgow —* Glasgow is his place of residence.

This happened three years ago —♦ Three years have elapsed since it happened.

Apart from the cited sentence-part functions, the noun is characterized by some special types of combinability. In particular, typical of the noun is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb. E.g.: an entrance to the house, to turn round the comer, red in the face, far from its destination.

English nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact. In the contact group the noun in preposition plays the role of a semantic qualifier to the noun in post-position. E.g.: a cannon ball, a log cabin, a sports even, a film festival. The lexico-grammatical status of such combinations has presented a big problem for scholars. The question is how to treat them either as one separate word or as a word-group. In the history of linguistics this controversial question is know as “The cannon ball problem”.

Taking into consideration the results of the comprehensive analysis undertaken in this field by Russian linguists, we may define the combination as a specific word-group with intermediary features. Crucial for this decision is the isolation test which is performed by a productive type of transformation. E.g.: the court regulation —> the regulation of the court, the progress report —* the report about progress, the funds distribution —*• the distribution of the funds.

The corresponding compound nouns, as a rule, cannot undergo the isolation test with an equal ease. The transformations of such kind are in fact reduced to sheer explanations of their etymological motivation. For example: starlight —» light coming from stars, fire-place —> place where fire is made. On the other hand, the comparatively closer connection between the stems in compound nouns is reflected by the spelling (contact or hyphenated presentation).

Contact noun attributes forming a string of several words are very characteristic of professional language:

A number of Space Shuttle optimization problems were raised in the development of the algorithm...

As a part of speech, the noun is also characterized by a set of formal features determining its specific status in the lexical paradigm of nomination. It has its word-building distinctions, including typical suffixes, compound stem models. It discriminates the grammatical categories of gender, number, case, article determination.

The cited formal features taken together are relevant for the division of nouns into several subclasses. The first nounal subclass opposition differentiates proper and common nouns. The foundation of this division is “type of nomination”. The second subclass opposition differentiates animate and inanimate nouns on the basis of “form of existence”. The third subclass opposition differentiates human and non-human nouns on the basis of “personal quality”. The fourth subclass opposition differentiates countable and uncountable nouns on the basis of “quantitative structure”. Somewhat less explicitly and rigorously realized is the division of English nouns into concrete and abstract.

The subclass differentiation of nouns constitutes a foundation for their selectional syntagmatic combinability both among themselves and with other parts of speech. For example:

The sandstone vras crumbling.

The horse was crumbling.

The poor creature was laming.

The tree was laming.

The phenomenon of subclass selection is intensely analyzed as part of current linguistic research work.