The English adjective has lost in the course of history all its forms of grammatical agreement with the noun. As a result, the only paradigmatic forms of the adjective are those of degrees of comparison. The meaning of the category of comparison is expression of different degrees of intensity of some property revealed by comparing […]

Adjectives as a rule have a suffixational structure and, on the ground of their derivational pattern, are divided into base adjectives and derived adjectives. Base adjectives are usually monosyllabic, which influences their formal qualities: they form the degrees of comparison by taking inflections -er and -est or by undergoing morphophonemic changes, i.e. they have developed […]

The Adjective is a part of speech with the categorical meaning of a rela­tively permanent property of a substance: a thick book, a beautiful city. The adjective denotes a property that does not evolve in time and it is this static character that is meant under the notion of relative permanence: cf. high quality and […]

Fairly obviously word order is an alternative to case marking in distin­guishing subject from object in English, as well as in languages like Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, all of which use the Subject-Verb-Object or­der as their unmarked option. In English the word order also distinguishes the patient object (i.e. direct object) from the recipient or […]

Since the late 1960s a number of theories have been put forward claim­ing that the semantic relationships borne by nominal parts of speech to verbs make up a small, universal set. Since obviously there is a great deal of vari­ation between languages as to how many cases they have, the semantic rela­tionships that are posited […]

In Modern English the problem of case is reduced to the dispute whether the case category exists as such. Open to thought and questioning, this prob­lem has always been much debated. The solution of the problem depends mainly on grammarians’ interpretation of the term “case”. As we will see below, some scholars consider it to […]

Noun: Category of case in modern English grammars – Part 1 We have considered the three theories which, if at basically different angles, proceed from the assumption that the English noun docs distinguish the grammatical case in its functional structure. However, another view of the problem of the English noun cases has been put forward […]

Noun: Number – Part 1 The two subclasses of uncountable nouns are usually referred to, re­spectively, as singularia tantum (only singular) and pluralia tantum (only plural). The singularia tantum subclass may also be referred to as the “absolute” singular, and is different from “common” singular of the countable nouns in that the absolute singular excludes […]

The category of number in English, like in most other languages, is expressed by the opposition of the plural form of the noun to the singular form. The singular form coincides with the basic form of a noun, whereas the plural form is expressed by means of the formant -s (-es) in writing. Pro­nunciation of […]

Case in traditional grammar The western tradition of describing case systems can be traced back to the Greeks. Ancient Greek, like the other “older” Indo-European languages, was a fusional inflecting language in which case marking could not be sepa­rated from number marking, where there was also some fusion of the stem and inflection, and where […]