D. V. Demidov

Questions for Reflection: 
1. Can the term ―parts of speech‖ be considered a suitable 
one? 
2. What are the existing approaches to the parts of speech 
problem? 
3. What does the classical approach consist in? What 
principle served as the basis of classification?
4. What syntactic properties of a part of speech does the 
functional criterion concerns? 
5. What principle was H. Sweet‘s classification based on?
6. What methods does the structural approach rely on?
7. What principle lay in the basis of Ch. Fries‘s 
classification? What were the substitution patterns? How many 
classes did Ch. Fries single out? How many groups of functional 
words? 
8. What criteria are used by the adherents of the complex 
approach? What parts of speech are traditionally singled out?
9. What are the merits and demerits of the traditional 
classification of words into parts of speech?
10. What is the difference between notional classes and 
function words? 
11. What results of the four approaches to the parts of 
speech problem coincide and what results differ?

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Topic 4. General Survey of the Noun and its Categories. 
Questions for Discussion:  
1. Noun as the central nominative unit of language, its 
categorial meaning and formal characteristics.
2. The noun as an attribute (―the cannon ball problem‖). 
3. Formal and functional peculiarities of the category of 
number. 
4. The problem of the category of case and various 
approaches to its study. 
5. The meaningful character of the gender category in 
modern English. Gender oppositions and classes of nouns. 
6. The system of article determination in English. 
1. Noun as the central nominative lexemic unit of 
language, its categorial meaning and formal characteristics. 
The noun as a part of speech has the categorial meaning of 
―substance‖ or ―thingness‖. It follows from this that the noun is 
the main nominative part of speech, effecting nominatio n of the 
fullest value within the framework of the notional division of the 
lexicon. 
Nouns directly name various phenomena of reality and 
have the strongest nominative force among notional parts of 
speech: practically every phenomenon can be presented by a noun 
as an independent referent, or, can be substantivized. Nouns 
denote things and objects proper (tree), abstract notions (love), 
various qualities (bitterness), and even actions (movement). All 
these words function in speech in the same way as nouns de noting 
things proper. 
The noun has the power, by way of nomination, to isolate 
different properties of substances (i.e. direct and oblique qualities, 
and also actions and states as processual characteristics of 

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substantive phenomena) and present them as corresponding self-
dependent substances. E.g.: 
Her words were unexpectedly bitter. – We were struck by 
the unexpected bitterness of her words. At that time he was down 
in his career, but we knew well that very soon he would be up 
again. – His career had its ups and downs. [2, p. 49] 
Formally, the noun is characterized by a specific set of 
word-building affixes and word-building 
models, which 
unmistakably mark a noun, among them: suffixes of the doer 
(worker, naturalist), suffixes of abstract notions (laziness, 
rotation, security, elegance), special conversion patterns (to find – 
a find), etc. As for word-changing categories, the noun is changed 
according to the categories of number (boy-boys), case (boy-
boy‟s), and article determination (boy, a boy, the boy). Formally 
the noun is also characterized by specific combinability with 
verbs, adjectives and other nouns, introduced either by preposition 
or by sheer contact. The noun is the only part of speech which can 
be prepositionally combined with other words, e.g.: the book of 
the teacher, to go out of the room, away from home, typical of the 
noun, etc. 
The most characteristic functions of the noun in a sentence 
are the function of a subject and an object, since they commonly 
denote persons and things as components of the situation, e.g.: 
The teacher took the book. Besides, the noun can function as a 
predicative (part of a compound predicate), e.g.: He is a teacher; 
and as an adverbial modifier, e.g.: It happened last summer. The 
noun in English can also function as an attribute in the following 
cases: when it is used in the genitive case (the teacher‟s book), 
when it is used with a preposition (the book of the teacher), or in 
contact groups of two nouns the first of which qualifies the second 
(cannon ball, space exploration, sea breeze, the Bush 
administration, etc.). 

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