Card №1 Grammatical meaning and form. The noun, category of number and case

What is RP often identified with in the public mind?

The term "Standard Pronunciation" was replaced by "Received Pronunciation", which had been introduced for Southern Educated English by phonetician Ida Ward who defined it as pronunciation which " had lost all easily noticeable local differences" [Leitner: 1982]. According to Wells the British Broadcasting Corporation(the BBC) adopted RP for the use by its news-readers since 1920s. The country's population, for more than half a century, had been exposed through broadcasting to RP. Until the early 70s of the last century it was the only accent demanded in the BBC's announcers. For that reason RP often became identified in the public mind with BBC English. Only over the last 30 years, both the BBC and other British national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of the accent of their broadcasters. [Wells: 1982].
Card № 3

1. 
   Grammatical category of the noun.
   

A grammatical category is linguistic meaning expressed by the opposition of mutually exclusive forms. The mutually exclusive, or opposed, forms must possess two types of features: common and distinctive. Consider, for example, the nouns a book and books. What is common to the two forms? Both forms denote discrete, or individualized, entities: a book means ‘one book’ while books mean ‘one book + one book + one book...’. What feature differentiates them? Number: a book refers to one individual book, while books refers to more than one – ‘oneness vs. non-oneness’. The category of number is, then, the opposition of the plural of the noun to the singular form of the noun. The plural form is the marked member of the opposition while the singular form is the unmarked member1 . The marked member of an opposition must have a marker in the surface structure. The markers of plurality are the inflection -(e)s [-z, -s, -iz]: dog - dogs, clock – clocks, box – boxes. The singular form has no material marker, it has a ‘zero’ inflection. The other, non-productive ways of marking plurality are: 1) internal vowel change in several relict forms (man – men, woman – women, foot – feet, mouse – mice, 2) the use of the archaicinflection-(e)n (ox-oxen,child–children,cow–kine,brother–brethren). Some words borrowed from Latin and Greek preserve their classical plural forms (formula – formulae, phenomenon – phenomena, crisis – crises, criterion – criteria, etc.). There is an increasing tendency for regular –s plurals to alternate with classical plurals, e.g. memorandum – memoranda / memorandums; vertebra – vertebrae / vertebras; vortex – vortices/vortexes; criterion – criteria / criterions; bureau – bureaux / bureaus; cactus – cacti / cactuses; index – indices / indexes; formula - formulae /formulas, antenna - antennae / antennas, etc. The tendency to use the classical plural form is still strong in the language of science. The English form is preferred in fiction and spoken English (Gunnar Kiviväli, 1971:37). In some cases the plural form of the noun is homonymous (i.e. identical in form) with the singular form (sheep – sheep; deer – deer; swine - swine; trout – trout; code – code; pike – pike; salmon – salmon; haddock – haddock; mackerel – mackerel; carp – carp; perch - perch; grouse – grouse; wildfowl - wildfowl; species – species; series – series; craft – craft; aircraft - aircraft).
The category of number is based on countable nouns, i.e. nouns having numeric (discrete) structure. Uncountable nouns have no category of number, for they have quantitative (indiscrete) structure. Two classes of uncoutables can be distinguished: singularia tantum (only singular) and pluralia tantum (only plural). M. Blokh (op. cit., 59) does not exclude the singularia tantum subclass from the category of number. He calls such forms absolute singular forms comparable to the ‘common’ singular of countable nouns.
The absolute singular is characteristic of the names of abstract notions (love, courage, beauty, cruelty, etc.), the names of the branches of professional activity (philology, linguistics, mathematics, pragmatics), the names of materials (steel, iron, water, gas), the names of collective inanimate objects (foliage, fruit, furniture), the names of some diseases (measles, mumps).

2.