NOUN: GENDER. The category of gender is expressed in English by the obligatory correlation of nouns with the personal pronouns of the third person

The category of gender is expressed in English by the obligatory correlation of nouns with the personal pronouns of the third person. These serve as specific gender classifiers of nouns, being potentially reflected on each entry of the noun in speech.

The category of gender is strictly oppositional. It is formed by two oppositions related to each other on a hierarchical basis.

One opposition functions in the whole set of nouns, dividing them into person (human) nouns and non-person (non-human) nouns. The other opposition functions in the subset of person nouns only, dividing them into masculine nouns and feminine nouns. Thus, the first, general opposition can be referred to as the upper opposition in the category of gender, while the second, partial opposition can be referred to as the lower opposition in this category.

As a result of the double oppositional correlation, a specific system of three genders arises, which is somewhat misleadingly represented by the traditional terminology: the neuter (i.e. non-person) gender, the masculine (i.e. masculine person) gender, the feminine (i.e. feminine person) gender.

A great many person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine person genders by way of the pronominal correlation in question. These are referred to as nouns of the "common gender". Here belong such words as person, parent, friend, cousin, doctor, president, etc. E.g.:

The President of our Medical Society isn't going to be happy about the suggested way of cure. In general she insists on quite another kind of treatment in cases like that.

NOUN: NUMBER

The category of number is expressed by the opposition of the plural form of the noun to the singular form of the noun. The strong member of this binary opposition is the plural, its productive formal mark being the suffix -(e)s [-z, -s, -iz ] as presented in the forms dog — dogs, clock — clocks, box — boxes. The productive formal mark correlates with the absence of the number suffix in the singular form of the noun. The semantic content of the unmarked form, as has been shown above, enables the grammarians to speak of the zero-suffix of the singular in English.

The other, non-productive ways of expressing the number opposition are vowel interchange in several relict forms (man — men, woman — women, tooth — teeth, etc.), the archaic suffix -(e)n supported by phonemic interchange in a couple of other relict forms (ox — oxen, child — children, cow — kine, brother — brethren), the correlation of individual singular and plural suffixes in a limited number of borrowed nouns (formula — formulae, phenomenon — phenomena, alumnus — alumni, etc.). In some cases the plural form of the noun is homonymous with the singular form (sheep, deer, fish, etc.).

NOUN: CASE

Case is the immanent morphological category of the noun manifested in the forms of noun declension and showing the relations of the nounal referent to other objects and phenomena. Thus, the case form of the noun, or contractedly its "case" (in the narrow sense of the word), is a morphological-declensional form.

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 which term we will stick in the following presentation*), 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, the clerk's promotion, the Empress's jewels.

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