Дипломная работа: Nouns

National Airlines transported (at least) 2 million persons in 1979.

Given that, in general, all passengers are persons, the last sentence above ought to follow logically from the first one. But it doesn't. It is easy to imagine, for example, that on average, every person who travelled with National Airlines in 1979, travelled with them twice. In that case, one would say that the airline transported 2 million passengers but only 1 million persons . Thus, the way that we count passengers isn't necessarily the same as the way that we count persons . Put somewhat differently: At two different times, you may correspond to two distinct passengers , even though you are one and the same person. For a precise definition of identity criteria , see Gupta.

Recently, the linguist Mark Baker has proposed that Geach's definition of nouns in terms of identity criteria allows us to explain the characteristic properties of nouns. He argues that nouns can co-occur with (in-)definite articles and numerals, and are "prototypically referential" because they are all and only those parts of speech that provide identity criteria. Baker's proposals are quite new, and linguists are still evaluating them.

Categories of Nouns

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:

a. He got into trouble . (non-count)

b. He had many troubles . (countable)

c. Experience (non-count) is the best teacher.

d. We had many exciting experiences (countable) in college.

Whether these words are count or non-count will determine whether they can be used with articles and determiners or not. (We would not write "He got into the troubles," but we could write about "The troubles of Ireland."

Some texts will include the category of abstract nouns , by which we mean the kind of word that is not tangible, such as warmth, justice, grief, and peace . Abstract nouns are sometimes troublesome for non-native writers because they can appear with determiners or without: "Peace settled over the countryside." "The skirmish disrupted the peace that had settled over the countryside." See the section on Plurals for additional help with collective nouns , words that can be singular or plural, depending on context.

Forms of Nouns

Nouns can be in the subjective, possessive, and objective case. The word case defines the role of the noun in the sentence. Is it a subject, an object, or does it show possession?

· The English professor [subject] is tall.

· He chose the English professor [object].

· The English professor's [possessive] car is green.

Nouns in the subject and object role are identical in form; nouns that show the possessive, however, take a different form. Usually an apostrophe is added followed by the letter s (except for plurals, which take the plural "-s" ending first, and then add the apostrophe). See the section on Possessives for help with possessive forms. There is also a table outlining the cases of nouns and pronouns .

Almost all nouns change form when they become plural , usually with the simple addition of an -s or -es . Unfortunately, it's not always that easy, and a separate section on Plurals offers advice on the formation of plural noun forms.

Assaying for Nouns

Back in the gold rush days, every little town in the American Old West had an assayer's office, a place where wild-eyed prospectors could take their bags of ore for official testing, to make sure the shiny stuff they'd found was the real thing, not "fool's gold." We offer here some assay tests for nouns. There are two kinds of tests: formal and functional — what a word looks like (the endings it takes) and how a word behaves in a sentence.

· Formal Tests

1. Does the word contain a noun-making morpheme? organization , misconception , weirdness , statehood , government , democracy , philistinism , realtor , tenacity , violinist

2. Can the word take a plural-making morpheme? pencils , boxes

3. Can the word take a possessive-making morpheme? today's , boys'

· Function Tests

1. Without modifiers, can the word directly follow an article and create a grammatical unit (subject, object, etc.)? the state, an apple, a crate

2. Can it fill the slot in the following sentence: "(The) _________ seem(s) all right." (or substitute other predicates such as unacceptable, short, dark, depending on the word's meaning)?

Collective Nouns, Company Names,
Family Names, Sports Teams

There are, further, so called collective nouns , which are singular when we think of them as groups and plural when we think of the individuals acting within the whole (which happens sometimes, but not often).

audience band class committee crowd dozen

family flock group heap herd jury

kind lot [the] number public staff team

Thus, if we're talking about eggs, we could say "A dozen is probably not enough." But if we're talking partying with our friends, we could say, "A dozen are coming over this afternoon." The jury delivers its verdict. [But] The jury came in and took their seats. We could say the Tokyo String Quartet is one of the best string ensembles in the world, but we could say the Beatles were some of the most famous singers in history. Generally, band names and musical groups take singular or plural verbs depending on the form of their names: "The Mamas and the Papas were one of the best groups of the 70s" and "Metallica is my favorite band."

Note that "the number" is a singular collective noun. "The number of applicants is steadily increasing." "A number," on the other hand, is a plural form: "There are several students in the lobby. A number are here to see the president."

Collective nouns are count nouns which means they, themselves, can be pluralized: a university has several athletic teams and classes . And the immigrant families kept watch over their herds and flocks .

The word following the phrase one of the (as an object of the preposition of ) will always be plural.