category. On the other hand, when there is no special need to indicate the sex of the person referents of these nouns, they are used neutrally as masculine, ie they correlate with the masculine third person pronoun.
In the plural, all the gender distinctions are neutralised in the immediate explicit expression, though they are rendered obliquely through the correlation with the singular.
Alongside of the demonstrated grammatical (or lexico-grammatical, for that matter) gender distinctions, English nouns can show the sex of their referents lexically, either by means of being combined with certain notional words used as sex indicators, or else by suffixal derivation. Cf.: Boy-friend, girl-friend; man-producer, woman-producer; washer-man, washer-woman; landlord, landlady; bull-calf, cow-calf; cock-sparrow, hen-sparrow; he-bear , she-bear; master, mistress; actor, actress; executor, executrix; lion, lioness; sultan, sultana; etc.
One might think that this kind of the expression of sex runs contrary to the presented gender system of nouns, since the sex distinctions inherent in the cited pairs of words refer not only to human beings (persons), but also to all the other animate beings. On closer observation, however, we see that this is not at all so. In fact, the referents of such nouns as jenny-ass, or pea-hen, or the like will in the common use quite naturally be represented as it, the same as the referents of the corresponding masculine nouns jack-ass, pea-cock , and the like. This kind of representation is different in principle from the corresponding representation of such nounal pairs as woman - man, sister - brother, etc. p align="justify"> On the other hand, when the pronominal relation of the non-person animate nouns is turned, respectively, into he and she, we can speak of a grammatical personifying transposition, very typical of English. This kind of transposition affects not only animate nouns, but also a wide range of inanimate nouns, being regulated in every-day language by cultural-historical traditions. Compare the reference of she with the names of countries, vehicles, weaker animals, etc.; The reference of he with the names of stronger animals, the names of phenomena suggesting crude strength and fierceness, etc. p align="justify"> В§ 4. As we see, the category of gender in English is inherently semantic, ie meaningful in so far as it reflects the actual features of the named objects. But the semantic nature of the category does not in the least make it into "non-grammatical", which follows from the whole content of what has been said in the present work. p align="justify"> In Russian, German, and many other languages ​​characterised by the gender division of nouns, the gender has purely formal features that may even "run contrary" to semantics. Suffice it to compare such Russian words as склянка - він, чашка-вона, блюдце - воно, as well as their German correspondences das Glas - es, die Tasse - sie, der Teller - er, etc. But this phenomenon is rather an exception than the rule in terms of grammatical categories in general. p align="justify"> Moreover, alongside of the "formal" gender, there exists in Russian, German and other "formal gender" languages ​​meaningful gender, featuring, within the respective idiomatic systems, the natural sex distinctions of the noun referents.
In particular, the Russian gender differs idiomatically from the English gender in so far as it divides the nouns by the higher opposition not into "person - non-person" ("human-non human" ), but into "animate-inanimate", discriminating within the former (the animate nounal set) between masculine, feminine, and a limited number of neuter nouns. Thus, the Russian category of gender essentially divides the noun into the inanimate set having no meaningful gender, and the animate set having a meaningful gender. In distinction to this, the English category of gender is only meaningful, and as such it is represented in the nounal system as a whole. br/>
CHAPTER VII. NOUN: NUMBER
The category of number is expressed by the opposition of the plural form of the noun to the singular form of the noun. The strong member of this binary opposition is the plural, its productive formal mark being the suffix - (e) s [-z,-s,-iz] as presented in the forms dog - dogs, clock - clocks, box - boxes. The productive formal mark correlates with the absence of the number suffix in the singular form of the noun. The semantic content of the unmarked form, as has been shown above, enables the grammarians to speak of the zero-suffix of the singular in English. p align="justify"> The other, non-productive ways of expressing the number opposition are vowel interchange in several relict forms (man - men, woman - women, tooth - teeth, etc.), the archaic suffix - (e ) n supporte...
