In a language, the category of gender must be strictly oppositional. In other words, it should consist of at least two members of the opposition. The classical gender opposition contains three members: masculine gender, feminine gender and neuter (the third is missing in some languages, as it is the case in Italian). The opposition also […]

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 […]

The noun as a part of speech has the categorical meaning of “substance” or “thingness”. “Thingness” is a grammatical meaning that permits names of abstract notions, actions, and qualities to function in the same way with names of objects and living beings. Nouns may be derived from verbs and adjectives by various derivational means and […]

The Gerund is the most specific non-finite form of the verb in the Eng­lish language. The formal sign of the Gerund is wholly homonymous with that of Participle I: it is the suffix -ing added to its grammatically leading element. Whereas the Infinitive and the Participles are forms typical of all modern Indo-European languages, the […]

The Infinitive is the non-finite form of the verb which combines the properties of the verb with those of the noun, serving as the verbal name of a process. By virtue of its general process-naming function, the Infinitive should be considered as the head-form of the whole paradigm of the verb. In this quality it […]

From theoretical observations, one may conclude that the verb has pecu­liarities of two types. The peculiarities of the first type are verbal proper, i.e. they convey purely verbal grammatical meanings, meanings that no other part of speech possesses. These peculiarities (or, to be exact, categories) do not depend on syntagmatic relations, that is, they are […]