The history of English provides an example of nounal categories with­ering away. In Old English there were four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative) plus a vestigial instrumental. The cases in Old English were only weakly differentiated, with more differentiation in the demonstra­tive pronoun than in the noun. The Old English case paradigms were strik­ingly […]

There may also be a subcategorization of common nouns that uses the grammatical category of number as a criterion. This subcategorization is also called a formal subcategorization. This approach divides common nouns into count nouns (or countables) and mass nouns (or uncountables). This differentiation is intrinsically oriented to extralingual reality as countables, as a rule, […]

Almost any part of speech may undergo further differentiation into sub­groups. One of the traditional categorizations of the noun consists of the two large classes – proper nouns and common nouns. It should be noted that proper nouns have been usually overlooked by linguists, since their lexical meaning is difficult to investigate. Both philosophers and […]

English nouns may be mono- as well as polysyllabic. The number of monosyllabic nouns in which the root, the stem and the word proper over­lap, is quite considerable. Nevertheless, noun-forming derivational means are rather numerous. Grammatically, it is important, since suffixes, besides their semantic function, also serve as part-of-speech indicators. The suffixational structure is found […]