8. The noun. The category of case

Noun as a part of speech:

3. Semantic – a part of speech which categorial meaning is thingness

4. Formal – a) form-building – the category of number, the category of case, the category of gender, the category of article determination

b) derivational – typical word-building patterns: suffixation, compounding, convertion (to walk – a walk)

3) Functional – a) combinability: left-hand prepositional combinability with another N/V/Adj./Adv. [+ prep.Noun],casal combinability [N's+N]( .: the speech of the President — the President's speech), contact comb-ty [N+N]- stone-wall constructions, take an intermediary position between compound nouns and noun phrases (stone wall, car roof, speech sound), comb-ty with articles and other determiners [art./det. + N]

b) Syntactic functions – subject, object, other functions are less typical

Nouns fall into several subclasses which differ as to their semantic and grammatical properties: common — proper, concrete — abstract, countable — uncountable (count — non-count, count — mass), animate — inanimate, personal — non-personal (human — non-human).

Lexico- semantic variants of nouns may belong to different subclasses: paper — a paper, etc.

The class of nouns can be described as a lexico-grammatical field. Nouns denoting things constitute the centre (nucleus) of the field. Nouns denoting processes, qualities, abstract notions (predicate nouns) are marginal, peripheral elements of the field.

• Nucleus and periphery are distinguished on the basis of lexico-semantic properties and morph. characteristics – subclasses of Nouns

• The nucleus -> common- concrete-countable- animate Nouns

• The periphery -> abstract – material- uncountable Nouns

The category of case

Case is a morphological category which has a distinct syntactic significance, as it denotes relations, of nouns towards other words in the sentence. Languages of synthetic structure have a developed case-system. Languages of analytical structure lack these morphological variants.

This category is expressed in English by the opposition of the form in -'s [-z, -s, -iz], usually called the "possessive" case, or more traditionally, the "genitive" case, to the unfeatured form of the noun, usually called the "common" case. The apostrophised -s serves to distinguish in writing the singular noun in the genitive case from the plural noun in the common case. E.g.: the man's duty, the President's decision, Max's letter; the boy's ball.

Common case

• Wide, too general

Genetive case

• More precise. It has a wide variety of meanings:

1. Possessive genitive, e.g.:

Mrs. Johnson s passport —* Mrs- Johnson has a passport (R. Quirk etal.).

2. Subjective genitive, indicating the doer of the action, e.g.: the people's choice —» The people chose (S. Greenbaum).

3. Genitive of source, denoting such relationships as authorship and origin. Cf.:

the general's letter —> The general wrote a letter (R. Quirk et al.).

Australia's exports —» the exports that come from Australia (S. Greenbaum).

4. Objective genitive, indicating the object of the action, e.g.: Kennedy's assassination —> Somebody assassinated Kennedy

(S. Greenbaum).

5. Temporal genitive, denoting a period of time, e.g.:

ten days' absence —> The absence lasted ten days (R. Quirk et al.).

6. Equational genitive, establishing the identity of the referent,

e.g.:

a mile's distance ~+ The distance is a mile (L.S. Barkhudarov).

7. Genitive of destination, e.g.:

a women s college —»• a college for women (R. Quirk et al.).

The semantic classification, in the opinion of R. Quirk and his co-authors, is in part arbitrary. For example, one could claim that cow's milk is not a genitive of origin (milk from a cow) but a subjective genitive (The cow provided the milk). No wonder that L.S. Barkhudarov sometimes finds it difficult to name the kernel sentence from which the construction with the genitive case has been derived, e.g.: Nick's school (L.S. Barkhudarov). Of course, Nick's school could be transformed into Nick goes to school, but such transformations can be regarded only as quasi transformations [Z. Harris] because they do not give an opportunity to clearly formulate the rules of generating constructions with the genitive case. + для практики посм в книге типы генетивов: double, absolute

The category of case is disputative

As there exist several CASE THEORIES:

1) Limited case theory (Sweet, Jesperson)

There is such category and there are only 2 cases one of them featured and the other one unfeatured. + Smirnitskij.

2)Positional case theory (Nesfield, Bryant)

The type of the case not on the base of the form of the Noun but on its position => 4 cases:

The nominative case (subject to a verb): Rain falls. The vocative case (address): Are you coming, my friend? The dative case (indirect object to a verb): I gave John a penny. The accusative case (direct object, and also object to a preposition): The man killed a rat. The earth is moistened by rain.

3. Prepositional case theory (Curme)

Combinations of nouns with prepositions in certain object and attributive collocations should be understood as morphological case forms. To these belong first of all the "dative" case (to+Noun, for+Noun) and the "genitive" case (of+Noun). These prepositions, according to G. Curme, are "inflexional prepositions", i.e. grammatical elements equivalent to case-forms. The would-be prepositional cases are generally taken (by the scholars who recognise them) as coexisting with positional cases, together with the classical inflexional genitive completing the case system of the English noun.

OR Konspekt: Preposition+Noun = a special type of case => as many cases as many combinations

The prepositional theory, though somewhat better grounded than the positional theory, nevertheless can hardly pass a serious linguistic trial. As is well known from noun-declensional languages, all their prepositions, and not only some of them, do require definite cases of nouns (prepositional case-government); this fact, together with a mere semantic observation of the role of prepositions in the phrase, shows that any preposition by virtue of its functional nature stands in essentially the same general grammatical relations to nouns. It should follow from this that not only the of-, to-, and for-phrases, but also all the other prepositional phrases in English must be regarded as "analytical cases".!!! (can be treated as analytical -I gave it to a boy) As a result of such an approach illogical redundancy in terminology would arise: each prepositional phrase would bear then another, additional name of "prepositional case", the total number of the said "cases" running into dozens upon dozens without any gain either to theory or practice

4) Postpositional Case Theory (Vorontsova,Arakin)

Noun has no category of case 's is not typical for this category, it can be added not only to a noun

5) Linatative Case Theory (Plotkin V.Ja.)