Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка : учебное пособие
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Theoretical Grammar
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(a strong member) Person nouns substituted by he /
she − (a weak member) Non-person nouns substituted by it Neuter Gender – Masculine Nouns substituted by
Masculine Gender + Feminine Nouns substituted by
Feminine Gender This interpretation, however, is open to criticism. First, the principle of binary privative opposition has not been correctly applied here. Both strong and weak members are marked. Second, a great many person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine 26 genders, e. g. person ,
,
,
,
,
,
, etc. Third, in the plural forms the gender distinctions are neutralized. There is another approach, typical of some British and American scholars. They identify the grammatical category of gender with a few closed groups of English nouns, e. g. kinship terms (
,
,
,
,
,
etc). The other groups include: man — woman ,
,
,
,
or, else, cock — hen ,
, etc. The problem with such words is that the biological sex distinctions are expressed here on the lexical level. It is the lexical meaning of these words which is responsible for the gender differentiations; no morphological correlations can be found with them. On the other hand, there are several non-productive suffixal formations of the type:
,
,
,
,
,
, etc. They are grammatically relevant and may be interesting in a diachronic study as the evidence of some former trends in the English language development. However, they are exceptional and cannot build up any grammatically significant paradigm within the Modern English noun system. The conclusion is that there is no grammatical category of gender in Modern English. Subclasses of English Nouns . Very important for current grammatical usage are semantic subdivisions of English nouns into proper and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete and abstract. In particular, the use of the English articles is affected by the noun belonging to the subclass of proper names or that of common nouns; or, else, concrete or abstract nouns. Within the category of number the plural form is impossible with uncountable nouns (names of substances and abstract notions). In the case system, inanimate nouns (with some exceptions) are not allowed to have the possessive case form. Attributive Function of English Nouns . In Modern English a noun may just stand before another noun and modify it, making up with it an attributive syntagma, e. g. stone wall ,
, etc. Different ideas have been put forward concerning this grammatical phenomenon. The 27 view that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun was expressed by H. Sweet and most other scholars; the view that it is an adjective or at least approaches the adjective state — by O. Jespersen. The third interpretation is that the first element is neither a noun nor an adjective, but a separate part of speech, viz. an attributive noun. The variety of opinions shows that the precise identification of the grammatical status of the element in question has run into considerable difficulties. First of all, it is difficult to apply here the criteria used to distinguish a noun from an adjective. The first element in the phrases like stone wall does not form degrees of comparison, but on the other hand, many English relative adjectives (e.
,
,
) do
not have degrees of comparison either. Most practical English grammars have chosen the interpretation that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun in a specific syntactic function. This view appears to be the most plausible. жүктеу/скачать 0,64 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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