Controversial aspects of the English noun

 

The noun in English distinguishes the following grammatical categories: the category of number, case, gender, and article determination. The basic problems with the interpretation of the noun are caused by typological restructuring of the English language, which led to the extinction of most inflectional noun forms and the reduction of noun paradigms in the history of English. The two most controversial categories of the noun in modern English are the category of case and the category of gender.

As for the category o case, linguists argue, first, whether the category of case still exists in modern English, and, second, if it does exist, how many case forms of the noun can be distinguished in English. In the analysis of this problem, four different approaches can be outlined.

The approach which is usually defined as “ the theory of positional cases ” was developed by J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutchbein, M. Bryant and other linguists, mainly in English-speaking countries. They follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. Since there are no special morphological marks to distinguish these cases in English (except for the genitive) like in Latin or other inflectional languages, the cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address. Thus, “the theory of positional cases” presents an obvious confusion of the formal, morphological characteristics of the noun and its functional, syntactic features. This approach only shows that the grammatical meanings expressed by case forms in inflectional languages (“noun-declensional” languages) are regularly expressed in English by other means, in particular by syntactic positions, or word-order.

The approach which is defined as “ the theory of prepositional cases ” supplements the previous approach and follows the same route of Latin-oriented grammar traditions. The linguists who formulated it, G. Curme among them, treat the combinations of nouns with prepositions as specific analytical case forms, e.g.: the dative case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, the genitive case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’, the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’, e.g.: for the girl, of the girl, with a key. They see the system of cases in English as comprising the regular inflectional case (the genitive), “positional cases”, and “prepositional cases”. This approach is not recognized by mainstream linguistics either, because, again, syntactical and morphological characteristics of the noun are confused. Besides, as B. Ilyish noted, if to be consistent in applying this theory, each prepositional phrase should be considered as a separate case form and their number will be almost infinite.

The approach which can be defined as “ the theory of limited case ” is the most widely accepted theory of case in English today. It was formulated by H. Sweet, O. Jespersen and further developed by Russian linguists A. Smirnitsky, L. Barchudarov and others. It is based on the oppositional presentation of the category: the form defined as “ the genitive case ” is the strong member of the opposition, marked by the postpositional element ‘ –s ’after an apostrophe in the singular and just an apostrophe in the plural, e.g.: the girl’s books, the girls’ books; the genitive is opposed to the unfeatured form, the weak member of the opposition, which is usually referred to as “ the common case ” (“ non-genitive ”). The category of case is realized in full in animate nouns and restrictedly in inanimate nouns in English, hence the name – “ the theory of limited case ”. Besides being semantically (lexically) limited, the category of case in English is limited syntactically, as the genitive case form of the noun is used only as an attribute, and it is also positionally limited: it is used predominantly in preposition to the word it modifies (except for some contexts, known as “double genitive”, e.g.: this idea of Tom’s).

The approach which can be defined as “ the theory of the possessive postposition ”, or “ the theory of no case ” states that the category of case did exist in Old English, but was completely lost by the noun in the course of its historical development. The proponents of this theory, G. N. Vorontsova, A. M. Mukhin among them, maintain that what is traditionally treated as the inflectional genitive case form is actually a combination of the noun with a postposition denoting possession. The main arguments to support this point of view are as follows: first, the postpositional element ‘s is not only used with words, but also with the units larger than the word, with word-combinations and even sentences, e.g.: his daughter Mary’s arrival, the man I saw yesterday’s face; it may be used with no noun at all, but with a pronoun, e.g.: somebody else’s car; second, the same meaning of possession is rendered in English by prepositional of -phrases, e.g .: this man’s daughter – the daughter of this man. The followers of this approach conclude that –s is no longer an inflection, but a particle-like postpositional word, so, “noun + –‘s ” is not a morphological form of the noun, but a purely syntactical construction and there is no longer a morphological category of case in English.

The advocates of “the possessive postpositive theory” have managed to specify the peculiarities of the genitive in English which make it different from regular case forms in inflectional languages; still, there are certain counter-arguments that prove the existence of the case category in English. First, cases when the possessive postpositive –‘s is added to units larger than the word are very few in comparison to cases where it is added to the noun (some estimates show the correlation as 4% to 96% respectively), besides, these cases are often stylistically marked and most of them make intermediary phenomena between a word and a word-combination, e.g.: what-his-name’s hat; the same applies to the use of the genitive marker –‘s with certain pronouns. Second, the possessive postpositive differs from regular particles: regular postpositional particles usually correspond with prepositions (to give up – up the hill), which is not the case with –‘s; the combinations of words with postpositional particles are usually lexicalized and recorded in dictionaries, while – ‘s is grammatically bound to the use of the noun and their combinations are never recorded as separate lexical units; –‘s is phonetically close to regular morphemes, as it has the same variants distinguished in complementary distributions as the grammatical suffix –s: [-s], [-z], [-iz]; thus, actually the status of –‘s is intermediary between a particle and a morpheme. As for the semantic parallelism between possessive postpositional constructions and prepositional of- phrases, there are definite semantic differences between them in most contexts: for example, as has been mentioned, genitive case forms are predominantly used with animate nouns, while of- phrases are used with inanimate nouns.

There are other suble differences and a number of additional arguments used on both sides. For example, there were attempts to use the correlation between the pronounal case system and the nounal case system to prove the absence of the category of case of nouns. According to the latest approach, the pronounal declension system has completely disintegrated, because, first, the traditionally distinguished case forms of pronouns are incompatible with the system of noun cases (the common case vs. the genitive case of the noun and the nominative case and the objective case of pronouns (I, we, you, he, etc. - me, us, you, him, etc.)); second, personal pronouns are no longer members of any productive declensional models. Still, neither the acceptance of the pronounal case nor its rejection can prove the existence or the absence of the nounal case category: the category of case of nouns cannot be treated as depending upon the case system of pronouns, since pronouns substitute for nouns, reflecting their categories, and not vice versa.

The solution to the problem of the category of case in English can be formulated on the basis of the two theories, “the theory of limited case” and “the theory of the possessive postpositive”, critically revised and combined. There is no doubt that the inflectional case of the noun in English has ceased to exist. The predominantly particle nature of the –‘s -marker is evident, but this does not prove the absence of the category of case: it is a specific particle expression of case which can be likened to the particle expression of the category of mood in Russian, cf.: Я бы пошел с тобой. Besides, two subtypes of the genitive are to be recognized in English: the word genitive (the principal type) and the phrase genitive (the minor type).

The category of gender is another highly controversial subject in English grammar. The overwhelming majority of linguists stick to the opinion that the category of gender existed only in Old English. They claim that, since formal gender marks disappeared by the end of the Middle English period and nouns no longer agree in gender with adjacent adjectives or verbs, there is no grammatical category of gender in modern English. They maintain that in modern English, the biological division of masculine and feminine genders is rendered only by lexical means: special words and lexical affixes, e.g.: man – woman, tiger – tigress, he-goat – she-goat, male nurse, etc.

The fact is, the category of gender in English differs from the category of gender in many other languages, for example, in Russian or in German. The fact is, the category of gender linguistically may be either meaningful (or, natural ), rendering the actual sex-based features of the referents, or formal ( arbitrary ). In Russian and some other languages the category of gender is meaningful only for human (person) nouns, but for the non-human (non-person) nouns it is formal; i.e., it does not correspond with the actual biological sense. In English gender is a meaningful category for the whole class of the nouns, because it reflects the real gender attributes (or their absence/ irrelevance) of the referent denoted. It is realized through obligatory correspondence of every noun with the 3rd person singular pronouns - he, she, or it: man – he, woman – she, tree, dog – it. For example: A woman was standing on the platform. She was wearing a hat. It was decorated with ribbons and flowers… Personal pronouns are grammatical gender classifiers in English.

The existence of the category of gender can be proved in the contexts of grammatical transposition, when the weak member of the opposition, nouns of the neuter gender, are used as if they denote female or male beings, substituted by the pronouns ‘ he’ or ‘she’. In most cases such use is stylistically colored. It is known as the stylistic device of personification and takes place either in some traditionally fixed contexts, e.g.: a vessel – she; or in high-flown speech, e.g., Britain – she, the sea – she.

Thus, the English language has preserved the basic grammatical categories of the noun, including the categories of case and gender, though their means of expression have been considerably transformed and are no longer inflectional, which causes a lot of controversy in their treatment.