Comparison of nouns in English and Russian languages

2.3 The functions of Nouns in English and in Russian languages 

     The noun has certain syntactical characteristics.

     The chief syntactical functions of the noun in the sentence are those of the subject and the object. But it might be used as an attribute or a predicative.

     The sun was rising in all his splendid beauty. [2, p.32] (subject)

     Troy and Yates followed the tourists. [5, p.59] (object)

     He (Bosinney) was an architect… [3, p.83] (predicative)

     Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish… [5, p.78] (attribute; the noun glass is used in the common case)

     The hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father’s yacht. [5, p.104] (attribute; the noun father is used in the genitive case)

     A noun preceded by a preposition (a prepositional phrase) may be used as attribute, prepositional indirect object, and adverbial modifier.

     To the left were clean panes of glass. [1, p.50] (attribute)

     Bicket did not answer, his throat felt too dry. He had heard of the police. [3, p.96] (object)

     She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire. [2, p.254] (adverbial modifier)

     "Stop everything, Laura!" cried Jose in astonishment.[2, p.261] (adverbial modifier)

     The noun is generally associated with the article. Because of the comparative scarcity of morphological distinctions in English in some cases only articles show that the word is noun.

     The noun can be modified by an adjective, a pronoun, by another noun or by verbals. The categorical functional properties of the noun are determined by its semantic properties.

     The most characteristic substantive function of the noun is that of the subject in the sentence, since the referent of the subject is the person or thing immediately named. The function of the object in the sentence is also typical of the noun as the substance word. Other syntactic functions, i.e. attributive, adverbial, and even predicative, although performed by the noun with equal ease, are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality as such. It should be noted that, while performing these non-substantive functions, the noun essentially differs from the other parts of speech used in similar sentence positions. This may be clearly shown by transformations shifting the noun from various non-subject syntactic positions into subject syntactic positions of the same general semantic value, which is impossible with other parts of speech. E.g.:

     Mary is a flower-girl.→ the flower-girl (you are speaking of) is Mary. He lives in Glasgow.→ Glasgow is his place of residence. This happened three years ago.→ Three years have elapsed since it happened.

     Apart from the cited sentence-part functions, the noun is characterised by some special types of combinability.

     In particular, typical of the noun is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb. E.g.: an entrance to the house; to turn round the corner; red in the face; far from its destination.

     The casual (possessive) combinability characterises the noun alongside of its prepositional combinability with another noun. E.g.: the speech of the President — the President's speech; the cover of the book — the book's cover.

     English nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact, unmediated by any special lexemic or morphemic means. In the contact group the noun in preposition plays the role of a semantic qualifier to the noun in post-position. E.g.: a cannon ball; a log cabin; a sports event; film festivals.

     The lexico-grammatical status of such combinations has presented a big problem for many scholars, who were uncertain as to the linguistic heading under which to treat them: either as one separate word, or a word-group. In the history of linguistics the controversy about the lexico-grammatical status of the constructions in question has received the half-facetious name "The cannon ball problem". [23]

     Taking into account the results of the comprehensive analysis undertaken in this field by Soviet linguists, we may define the combination as a specific word-group with intermediary features. Crucial for this decision is the isolability test (separation shift of the qualifying noun) which is performed for the contact noun combinations by an easy, productive type of transformation. Cf.: a cannon ball→ a ball for cannon; the court regulation→ the regulation of the court; progress report → report about progress; the funds distribution → the distribution of the funds.

     The corresponding compound nouns (formed from substantive stems), as a rule, cannot undergo the isolability test with an equal ease. The transformations with the noun compounds are in fact reduced to sheer explanations of their etymological motivation. The comparatively closer connection between the stems in compound nouns is reflected by the spelling (contact or hyphenated presentation). E.g.: fireplace→ place where fire is made; starlight → light coming from stars; story-teller → teller (writer, composer) of stories; theatre-goer → a person who goes to (frequents) theatres.

     Contact noun attributes forming a string of several words are very characteristic of professional language. E.g.: A number of Space Shuttle trajectory optimisation problems were simulated in the development of the algorithm, including three ascent problems and a re-entry problem (From a scientific paper on spacecraft). The accuracy of offshore tanker unloading operations is becoming more important as the cost of petroleum products increases (From a scientific paper on control systems).

     As a part of speech, the noun is also characterised by a set of formal features determining its specific status in the lexical paradigm of nomination. It has its word-building distinctions, including typical suffixes, compound stem models, conversion patterns. It discriminates the grammatical categories of gender, number, case, article determination, which will be analysed below. Subject and the verb in the following sentence: The poor creature was laming. (Not: The tree was laming.)

     The human selectional base underlies the connection between the nouns in the following combination: John's love of music (not: the cat's love of music).

     The phenomenon of subclass selection is intensely analysed as part of current linguistic research work.

     Conclusion

     We had investigated the similarities and differences of grammatical categories of noun in English and in Russian languages. And during this analysis we had found that Russian language as English has two numbers: singular and plural. The meaning of singular and plural seems to be self-explanatory. As we English plurals end in -s. But in Russian, there are more endings to make plurals. Some nouns are always singular as in English. These are nouns that designate substances (oxygen, copper), products (cheese, fish), a block of objects (furniture), some actions (hunting, clearing up), feelings (love, health), some vegetables and berries (potato, carrots).

     The case system in Russian is more developed comparing with English. In English there are only two cases: common case and genitive case. But in Russian language case system there are six cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Locative and Instrumental.

     The case system in Russian does two things. First, it marks the grammatical functions of nouns which are indicated by word order in English, that is, the subject, object and indirect object of the sentence. (This means that these nouns are free to be ordered almost anywhere in the sentence since their function is clearly indicated by their form.) Second, cases mark certain adverbial functions such as the time, manner, and means of carrying our an action, which are marked by prepositions in English, e.g. by hand, on Friday, with enthusiasm This function leads to the case system being associated with prepositions. Remember: in Russian all prepositions are associated with a case which is attached to their objects. Since only nouns can express case, this means that only nouns may be objects of prepositions.

 

      Conclusion

 

     In theoretical part of our course work we investigated two main questions: classification of nouns in English and morphological characteristics of nouns.

     We had found that nouns are classified into: (A) proper nouns; (B) common nouns. There are different groups of common nouns: class nouns, collective nouns, nouns of material and abstract nouns. Proper nouns are individual names given to separate persons or things. As regards their meaning proper nouns may be personal names (Mary, Peter, Shakespeare), geographical names (Moscow, London, the Caucasus), the names of the month and days of week (February, Monday), etc. Common nouns are names that can be applied to any individual of a class of persons or things (e. g. man, dog, book), collections of similar individuals or things regarded as a single unit (e. g. peasantry, family), materials (e. g. snow, iron, cotton) or abstract notions (e. g. kindness, development).

     According to their morphological composition nouns may be: simple, derivative and compound. The noun has such morphological characteristics as: number (singular and plural), case (the common case and the genitive case). 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.

     We had investigated the noun in our course paper. We had chosen this theme because we were interested in it and also it is one of the most important part of speech in teaching grammar not only in English but in other languages too. Nouns play great role in the person’s speech as it expresses name of things, events, and phenomenon.

     In our course paper we analyzed nouns as a expressions of social power.

     We used various references to investigate the noun. In our course work we had investigated the similarities and differences of grammatical categories of noun in English and in Russian languages. Russian language as English distinguishes two numbers and the meaning of singular and plural seems to be self-explanatory.

     The classification of nouns in these two languages is similar; there are two classes: proper nouns and common nouns, but in English this classification is narrowed (class nouns, collective noun, nouns of material, abstract nouns).

     Cases are something that is probably the most complicated concept in Russian language to the student that speaks only English. Old English had cases, but in contemporary English language you can notice cases and declension mostly in personal pronouns. The question about category of case in English for nowadays has discussion character. It depends on approach which author uses in this problem; to English language was given different numbers of cases. M. Deibchain assumed understanding of case as combination of preposition with noun in initial form; he supposed that there are four cases in English language: nominative, genitive (possessive), dative and accusative. But fundamentally, this version of the problem of case was represented in wrong way, so far as case is word form, which has corresponding to case morpheme, as –’s in English. So we can note from typological characteristics of case category of noun that all nouns in English are divided into two classes: words denote unanimated things, which have not the category of case; and words that denote animated things and time, which have two cases- nominative and possessive. If we recognize this point of view, it will correspond to the modern system of case; it means that in fact there is no category of case. In that moment we have new grammatical category called genitive category, which represented by morpheme -’s.

     So the analysis of this similarities and differences in these two languages will help teachers to teach grammar by comparing English with their mother tongue (Russian) or vice versa.

     preposition noun language semantic

 

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