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 […]

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 […]

As we have seen, all the attempts to work out a vocabulary classification based on one criterion only have failed. The main principles of ancient as well as modern wordstock classifica­tions were explicitly formulated by Russian academician Lev Shcherba. These are 1) semantic criterion; 2) morphological criterion, and 3) syntactic criterion. As it has been […]

The first two extant attempts to categorize words were undertaken in two different parts of the world, in Ancient Greece by Plato and in Ancient India by Panini, author of the oldest Sanskrit grammar. In Indian grammatical tradition, the ability to inflect, that is morphological characteristic, was taken as the basic criterion dividing words into […]