TOPIC 2: Morphological Features of the Noun as Part of Speech

2.1. Categorial meaning, division of nouns into subclasses. As a part of speech the noun is described in its peculiarity as a word with a specific morphemic structure created with noun-forming derivational means, among them affixation and compounding: prefixes: co-, ex-, over-, post-, under-, dis-, im-, un-:e.g. co-operation, ex-president, overeating, underestimation, postgraduate, disagreement, impossibility, unimportance; suffixes: -ee, -er, -age, -ance, -tion, -ence, -ment, -cy, -ity, -hood, -ness, -ship:

e.g. employee, worker, breakage, annoyance, organization, preference, amazement, fluency, popularity, childhood, kindness, friendship; compounding:adjective + noun: e.g. greenhouse, heavyweight, blackboard, self-confidence, rush hours, safety belt; noun + noun: e.g. cupboard, rainforest, countryside, chairman, teapot, earthquake, saucepan; gerund + noun: e.g. frying pan, drinking water, shaving cream, working hours, chewing gum, writing paper, walking stick.

In English, the noun is characterized by the categorial meaning of substantivity or thingness which is perceived in any noun irrespective of the form and lexical meaning: e.g. worker, teacher, doctor as doer of action; book, chair, house as a separate thing; rain, water, snow as natural phenomenon; love, beauty, generosity as an abstract notion, and so on. The main paradigmatic classes of nouns are found possible to distinguish: common nouns and proper nouns. Common nouns: concrete – denoting single physical objects (animate or inanimate) having a certain shape and measurements (e.g. table, pupil, lamp, dog); collective – denoting a group of objects (animate or inanimate) or paired objects (e.g. family, crew, delegation, government staff, jury, jeans, earrings, trousers); mass – denoting a physical substance having no particular shape or measurements (e.g. bread, sugar, copper, wine, snow, air, milk); abstract – denoting abstracted states, qualities, feelings (e.g. kindness, adoration, length, knowledge, delight, confidence, experience).As far as proper nouns are concerned, they split into some common subclasses as well indicating names of people, nationalities (the British, Ukrainians, Russian), family names ( Byron, Adams, Newton), geographical names (the Black Sea, Chicago, Moscow, the Pacific ocean), names of companies, hotels, newspapers, journals (Ford, the Daily News, the Hilton).

There is some peculiarity in the realization of the meaning of number and quantity in some groups of nouns in English. Firstly, a noun with the same form can have different kinds of meanings and, therefore, can function differently: concrete/abstract: a beauty – beauty, красавица – красота; an authority – authority, влиятельный человек – влияние; a witness – witness, свидетель – свидетельство; concrete thing/material: a lemon – lemon, лимон – сок; a chicken – chicken, цыпленок – мясо; an iron – iron, утюг – железо; a wood – wood, лес – древесина. Secondly, collective nouns may be used both in singular and in plural (when the constituent members of these collective nouns are meant): e.g. The crew are operating perfectly / The crew is excellent. The family go on holiday every summer / His family is not big.

Taking into account the substantive featuring of a noun, it is possible to identify its functional role in forming a sentence pattern: subject (The company is based in the capital city), object (We visited museums), predicative (He is anoffice worker), attribute (I like sea coast villages), adverbial modifier (There were a lot of people at the airport).

The grammatical features of the noun are outlined like the following: categorical meaning of substance; categorical changeable forms of number and case specifically highlighted by article determination; certain derivational patterns; substantive syntactic function and types of combinality

Key words:

morphemic structure морфемная структура

noun-forming derivational means деривационные средства существительного

affixation аффиксация

compounding образование сложносоставныхсуществительных

prefix приставка

suffix суффикс

categorial meaning of substantivity категориальное значение субстантивности

thingness предметность

common noun имя нарицательное

proper noun имя собственное

concrete noun конкретное существительное

animate noun одушевленное

inanimate noun неодушевленное

collective noun собирательное существительное

mass noun материальное существительное

abstract noun абстрактное существительное

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