Decide to what part of speech the underlined words may be assigned

1. He is given sight only after dusk, when he can witness his captors and saviours.

2. They told him that it was in an old nunnery, taken over by the Germans, then converted into a hospital after the Allies had laid siege to it.

3. Mason ceased talking, waiting for the doctor to say something.

4. They just want somebody to track him down. And you’re the somebody.

5. The smell of the dead is the worst.

6. Each night she climbed into the khaki ghostline of hammock she had taken from a dead soldier, someone who had died under her care.

7. Gerry, I didn’t know the real you. I’m sorry if I was a beast to you.

8. There was no justice for men, for they were ever in the dark!

9. They walked down a corridor, dark, smelly and sinister.

10. Mr. Bannock had a one-man office and I did all of the typing.

11. Before, when it had been cold, they had had to burn things.

12. He was out most evenings now, usually returning a few hours before dawn.

13. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a spray of radar. 14. Julian Bannock interrupted her by shaking his head.

15. And she has seen, he knows, even though now he is naked, the same man she photographed earlier in the crowded party, for by accident he stands the same way now, half turned in surprise at the light that reveals his body in the darkness.

16. As he repeatedly kicked the twisted metal, Langdon recalled his earlier conversation with Sophie.

17. Virginia, looking at the carbon copies now ragged at the edges from the gnawing of mice, thinking of the care she had taken with those papers when she had typed them, felt like crying.

18. I made it pretty clear that there was to be no nonsense about it.

19. He was suddenly aware that she had a good deal more than a pretty face and a good figure.

20. It was a huge bedroom with rose tapestry, indirect lighting, a king-sized bed with a telephone beside it, half a dozen comfortable chairs, an open door to a bathroom and another door leading to the corridor.

Seminar 5

Noun: Characteristic Features, Functional Properties and Grammatical Categories

1. The general characteristics of the noun as a part of speech. “The cannon ball problem”. The subclasses of the noun.

2. The problem of the category of gender in English, its oppositional structure.

3. Lexical gender distinctions.

4. The category of number. The semantic difference between singular and plural forms.

5. Singularia tantum (only singular) and pluralia tantum (only plural) nouns.

6. The category of case, its oppositional presentation, its peculiarity in the English language.

7. Article determination.

Practical assignments

I. Identify the syntactical functions of the underlined nouns.

1. The ship got under way.

2. He was certainly the best hated man in the ship.

3. I gave him a pound. Twelve dollars are enough for the man.

4. A dog is a man’s best friend.

5. High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince.

II. Give the feminine counterparts for the following masculine gender nouns and comment on the lexical means of expressing the category of gender.

boy-friend, landlord, lion, bridegroom, horse, actor, man-producer, master, wizard, count, baron, bachelor, sultan, cock, he-bear, jack-ass, businessman, executor, marquis.

III. Group the following nouns into: 1) regular countable nouns, 2) Singularia Tantum, 3) Pluralia Tantum. Consult the dictionary.

Sail, book, suspenders, contents, measles, watch, the Thames, suds, means, gallows, hoof, news, bellows, breeches, tweezers, foolishness, rickets, pincers, whereabouts, ashes, billiards, ceramics, police, Wales, the Netherlands, the United States.

IV. State the subclasses of the following nouns, comment on the meaning of number.

a table, a man, sugar, music, a family, spectacles, police, wines, Physics, Linguistics.