The opposition of discreteness/

Indiscreteness is explicitly expressed

e.g. dog – dogs

The opposition is revealed by syntactical and lexical correlation in the context

Nouns with homogenous number forms. The opposition is not expressed formally

e.g. sheep – sheep

Pluralia Tantum

Singularia Tantum

The names of abstract notions e.g. peace, love, joy	Objects consisting of two halves e.g. trousers, scissors, tongs
The names of the branches of professional activity e.g. chemistry, architecture, mathematics	The nouns expressing some sort of collective meaning e.g. supplies, outskirts, clothes
The names of mass-materials e.g. water, snow, steel	The nouns denoting some diseases and abnormal states of the body and mind e.g. measles, rickets, mumps
The names of collective inanimate objects e.g. foliage, fruit, furniture

Fig. 34

The category of number in English is restricted in its realization because of the dependent implicit grammatical meaning of countableness/uncountableness. The number category is realized only within subclass of countable nouns.

The grammatical meaning of number may not coincide with the notional quantity: the noun in the singular does not necessarily denote one object while the plural form may be used to denote one object consisting of several parts.

All English nouns may be subdivided into three groups (Fig. 34):

1. The nouns in which the opposition of explicit discreteness/indiscreteness is expressed;

2. The nouns in which this opposition is not expressed explicitly but is revealed by syntactical and lexical correlation in the context. There are two groups here: Singularia tantum and Pluralia tantum.

3. The nouns with homogenous number forms. The number opposition here is not expressed formally but is revealed only lexically and syntactically in the context.

Types of Oppositional Reduction

There are three types of oppositional reduction in the sphere of number category (Fig. 35).

The first type of reduction consists in the use of the absolute plural with countable nouns in the singular form. It concerns collective nouns which are changed into “nouns of multitude”.

The second type of the oppositional reduction consists in the use of the absolute plural with uncountable nouns in the plural form. It concerns cases of stylistic marking of nouns.

The third type of oppositional reduction concerns common countable nouns used in repetition groups. This variety of the absolute plural may be called “repetition plural”.

Reduction

Fig. 35

Category of Case

Case is a grammatical category which shows relation of the noun with other words in a sentence. It expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or sentence. The category of case correlates with the objective category of possession. It is expressed by the form of the noun. The case category in English is realized through the opposition: the Common Case and the Possessive or Genitive Case.

There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English. Different scholars stick to a different number of cases (Table 4).

Table 4