Examination card №9
1. THERE ARE THREE TENDENCIES IN GROUPING ENGLISH WORDS
INTO PARTS OF SPEECH. TELL ABOUT THEM
A thorough study of linguistic literature on the problem of English parts of speech
enables us to conclude that there were three tendencies in grouping English words
into parts of speech or into form classes:
1. Pre - structural tendency;
2. Structural tendency;
3. Post - structural tendency;
1. Pre - structural tendency is characterized by classifying words into word - groups
according to their meaning, function and form. To this group of scientists H. Sweet
O. Jespersen, O. Curme , B. Ilyish and other grammarians can be included.
2. The second tendency is characterized by classification of words exclusively
according to their structural meaning, as per their distribution. The representatives of
the tendency are: Ch. Fries, W. Francis, A. Hill and others.
3. The third one combines the ideas of the two above-mentioned tendencies. They
classify words in accord with the meaning, function, form; stem-building means and
distribution (or combinability). To this group of scientists, we can refer most Russian
grammarians such as: Khaimovitch and Rogovskaya , L. Barkhudarov and Shteling
and others.
2. THE CATEGORY OF NUMBER IN MODERN ENGLISH NOUNS
Number is a grammatical category. In English, the two number categories are singular
and plural. These two categories relate to nouns, pronouns, determiners, and verbs. In
other words, a noun, a pronoun, a determiner, or a verb can be described as singular or
plural.
The word "singular" refers to a quantity of one. The word "plural" refers to more than
one.
Plural Singular
Noun cat, mouse cats, mice
Pronoun I I, me, you, he, him, she, we, us, you, they, them
her, it
Determiner this, that, a, an, my, your, these, those, our, your,
his, her, its their
Verb am, is, was, has, I play, he are, were, have, they play
plays
3. THE CATEGORY OF CASE IN MODERN ENGLISH NOUNS
Case is a grammatical category which shows relation of the noun with other words in
a sentence. It is expressed by the form of the noun.
H. Sweet's conception of the number of cases in English doubtful.
He is not sure whether in English there are five or two cases.
H. Sweet's writes: “English has only one inflected case, the genitive /man’s, men’s/,
the uninflected base constituting the common case / man, men /, which is equivalent
to the nominative, vocative, accusative and dative of such a language as Latin”. (But
the facts of English made H.Sweet identify only two)
O. Curme considers that of many case endings once used English has preserved only
one, - 1st of the genitive. Apart from the genitive relation, these grammatical relations
are now indicated by the position of the noun with regard to the verb or prepositions
which have taken the place of the old inflectional endings / He distinguishes four
cases:
Nominative-performs 3 functions: subject, predicate and direct object
Accusative - performs 3 functions: object, adverbial modifier, predicate. The
dog bit my brother /obj./ He stayed an hour /adverbial acc/ I believed to be
him /predicate/
Dative: When an action directed toward smb: He makes coat for John.
Genitive: girl's ...
O. Jespersen distinguishes two cases: common and genitive.
M. Bryant is of the same opinion.
H. Whitehall distinguishes two cases in nouns on analogy with the pronouns
which can substitute for them: nominative and objective. He says: "The so-
called possessive case is best thought of as a method of transforming a noun
into a modifier"
Russian grammarians have different views on the problem of case system in
Modern English nouns.
