English grammar: the Noun

(ЧУОО ВО «ОмГА»)

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«Английский язык»

Тема:-« English grammar: the Noun»

The content of the work

Introduction

1. Noun (the Noun) as part of speech

1.1) General information

1.2) The category of the number of nouns

1.3) Gender category in English

1.4) Approaches to the classification of nouns in English

1.5)The category of the case of the noun

1.6) Functions of a noun in a sentence

1.7)Constructions with nouns

2. Difficulties of translation from English

2.1) The essence of translation and features of translation transformations

2.2)Analysis of examples of noun translation in literary texts

Conclusion

List of literature

Introduction

Already in ancient times, people paid attention to the fact that the words they used in their native language behave differently in speech. Some words call objects, others - actions, processes, and others - qualities, properties of objects. Some words are inclined by cases, others change by persons and tenses, etc.

These observations, which were noted by ancient Indian and ancient Greek grammarians, gave them the basis for distinguishing two distinct categories of words - the name and the verb. Aristotle (384-322 BC) distinguished three parts of speech - names, verbs and conjunctions.

Modern English is an analytical language in its structure, i.e. it has such a grammatical structure in which the connection of words in a sentence is expressed mainly by the order of words and by means of service words - prepositions and conjunctions. But Old English was a synthetic language, i.e. a language in which the connection of words in a sentence is expressed mainly by changing the words themselves. In the Old English language, a system of inflectional forms was developed: nouns had a developed declension system and a grammatical gender category, adjectives were consistent with nouns in gender, number and case, verbs had special forms for expressing perfect and imperfect forms, etc. These processes in language are reflected in the works of A.I.Smirnitsky, I.P.Ivanova, V.N.Yartseva and other scientists.

Changes in the meanings of words did not occur spontaneously. They were subordinated to certain laws that developed depending on the specific historical conditions of the development of production and any other activity of the people and on those connections of old and new concepts that arose in the popular consciousness of the people as reflections of real historical relations.

The purpose of this work is to study the position of the noun in modern, including literary, English.

The tasks of the work include:

1) define a noun as a part of speech in English;

2) consider the categories of number, gender, case;

3) to study the main approaches with the classification of nouns;

4) identify the main functions of nouns in English;

5) show the features of the translation of nouns from English into Russian on the material of literary texts.

1. Noun (the Noun) as part of speech

1.1. General information

A noun is a part of speech that denotes a subject  and answers questions: who is it? (Who is this?) or what is it? (What is this?). Nouns can denote objects and substances (a table, a house, water), living beings (a girl, a cat), phenomena and abstract concepts (rain, peace, beauty, work, darkness).

If in Russian the noun is characterized by the presence of three grammatical categories:

1) categories of case expressed by the declension paradigm consisting of six cases;

2) categories of number consisting of two numbers - singular and plural;

3) categories of grammatical gender representing three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter, having the corresponding morphological expression, then in English the noun is characterized by the presence of two grammatical categories:

1) the category of a number consisting of two numbers - singular and plural;

2) categories of determinativity (definiteness - uncertainty) expressed by articles in the preposition.

1.2. The category of the number of nouns

The category of numbers in English expresses quantitative relations existing in real reality, reflected in the minds of native speakers of a given language and having morphological expression in the corresponding forms of the language.

The category of numbers in modern English is expressed by singular and plural. The singular form is used to denote one object, the plural is used to denote two or more objects.

It should be noted that in the nominal declension of the Old English language there were at least 25 forms of the plural with a mutation, of which only seven have survived to this day: feet - legs, geese - geese, teeth - teeth, men - men, women - women, lice - lice and mice - mice. The so-called "weak declension" (with the basis of the plural) was widespread. numbers on - n), like the modern English words brethren - brothers, children - children and oxen - oxen. Such a weak plural became even more widespread in the southern dialect of Middle English, where forms like treen instead of trees - trees and housen instead of houses - houses were quite common. If this dialect had become the basis of literary English, and not East-central (i.e. London), then the forms on - en could be regular plural forms today. However, in reality, the most common forms of strong masculine declension in Old English, such as stan - stanas – stone - stones, prevailed (cf. Modern eng. stone - stones). The noun was inclined according to a "weak" or "strong" pattern, depending on the type of its original basis.