Курсовая работа: Nouns

Содержание

• The discovery of nouns
• Part 2
• Semantic vs. grammatical number
• Part 3
• Different definitions of nouns
• Expressions of natural language will have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they can take, and what kinds of other expressions they can combine with. but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of nouns on the top of this page is thus a formal definition. That definition is uncontroversial, and has the advantage that it allows us to effectively distinguish nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvandage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns by means of those. There are also several attempts of defining nouns in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are discussed below.
• Names for things
• Prototypically referential expressions
• Predicates with identity criteria
• Classification of nouns in English
• Proper nouns and common nouns
• Count nouns and mass nouns
• Collective Nouns
• Concrete nouns and abstract nouns
• Nouns and pronouns
• Semantic vs. grammatical number
• Number in specific languages
• English
• French
• Hebrew
• Obligatoriness of number marking
• Number agreement
• Verb conjugation
• Agreement in other lexical items
• Exceptions
• Collective nouns
• Types of number
• Singular versus plural
• Collective versus singulative
• Dual number
• Trial number
• Distributive plural
• Number particles
• Conclusion
• We have investigated the noun, the main part of speech in English grammar. We chose the noun as the theme of our course work because we interested in it. We used different kind of references to investigate the noun. Nouns can be classified further as count nouns, which name anything that can be counted (four books, two continents, a few dishes, a dozen buildings); mass nouns (or non-count nouns), which name something that can't be counted (water, air, energy, blood); and collective nouns, which can take a singular form but are composed of more than one individual person or items (jury, team, class, committee, herd). We should note that some words can be either a count noun or a non-count noun depending on how they're being used in a sentence. Whether or not a noun is uncountable is determined by its meaning: an uncountable noun represents something which tends to be viewed as a whole or as a single entity, rather than as one of a number of items which can be counted as individual units. Singular verb forms are used with uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns are substances, concepts etc that we cannot divide into separate elements. We cannot "count" them. For example, we cannot count "milk". We can count "bottles of milk" or "litres of milk", but we cannot count "milk" itself. We usually treat uncountable nouns as singular. We use a singular verb. Countable nouns are easy to recognize. They are things that we can count. For example: "pen". We can count pens. We can have one, two, three or more pens. We cannot say that it is finished investigation of this theme, because we are going to continue its investigation in our diploma work.
• Bibliography