11. Noun as a part of speech

A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in) definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase.

The word "noun" derives from the Latin nomen meaning "name", and a traditional definition of nouns is that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality or idea. They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that verbs like kill or die refer to events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives like yellow or difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside or upstairs seem to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of speech.

Case, number, and gender

In sentences, noun phrases may function in a variety of different ways, the most obvious being as subjects or objects. For example, in the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects (of which "letter" is a noun and "me" a pronoun). These different roles are known as noun cases. Variant forms of the same noun—such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)—are called declensions.

The number of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the simplest case, number distinguishes between singular ("man") and plural ("men"). Some languages, like Arabic (and also Saami and Aleut ) also distinguish dual from plural.

Many languages (though not English) have a concept of noun gender, also known as noun class, whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or feminine.

12. Category of number.

English countable nouns have 2 categories of number:

singular

plural

І. The plural form is formed be adding the ending -s, -es, pronounced as /z/, /s/, /iz/.

2. if the noun ends in –y presided by a consonant. –y is changed into –i + -es-

13. Category of case.

Case indicates the relations of the noun ( or pronoun ) to the other words in the sentence. Nouns denoting living beings and some nouns denoting lifeless things have two cases:

the common case.

the genitive case.

The genitive case is formed by:

‘s – is used with the singular and plural nouns not ending in –s:

a man’s job, men’s job, a child’s voice, a children’s voice.

b) a simple apostrophe (‘)is used with plural nouns ending in –s:

the students’ hostel, the Smiths’ car.

other names ending I –s can take “ ’s ” or the “ ’ ” alone:

14. The problem of gender.

In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. For example, in the words actor and actress the suffix -or denotes "male person" (masculine), and the suffix -ress denotes "female person" (feminine). This type of inflection, called lexical gender, is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages, including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally, Modern English does not mark nouns for gender, but it expresses gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. Grammatical gender may be partly assigned by convention, so it doesn't always coincide with natural gender. Furthermore, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. Gender can refer to the (biological) condition of being male or female, or less commonly hermaphrodite or neuter, as applied to humans, animals, and plants. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual intercourse.

15. Noun determiners. The article.

An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles can have various functions:

a definite article (English the) is used before singular and plural nouns that refer to a particular member of a group. (The cat on the mat is black.)

an indefinite article (English a, an) is used before singular nouns that refer to any member of a group. (A cat is a mammal).

a partitive article indicates an indefinite quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive article in English, though the words some or any often have that function.

a zero article is the absence of an article (e.g. English indefinite plural), used in some languages in contrast with the presence of one. Linguists hypothesize the absence as a zero article based on the X-bar theory.