英语中名词的分类

Nouns

Allan FangNovember.1st

Outline

•Background•••DefinitionClassificationSyntactic functions

Background

The development of nouns:

•Old English Period:

B.C 6th century: related to Christianitye.g. altar, amen, abbot, candleB.C 9th century: Scandinavians•Middle English Period: the Norman Conquest

•Modern English PeriodRenaissance

Definition

•Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they are subject (classed by gender, inflected for case and number).•Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality,quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.•Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other

lexical categories) in terms of their formal properties. These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their syntax –how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types.

Classification

Palmer: countables & uncountables

Huddleston: common nouns & proper nouns & pronouns

Quirk et al: counte:concrete/abstractnouns: common mass:concrete/abstract

proper: John, Paris

Brown: put forward a more concrete classification based on syntactic features.

Classification

•••••••Brown: compared with Quirk et al, he

added three features to the classification of nouns.

A. (+,-animate) : 有无生命的对象B. (+,-human): 是否为人类

C. (+,-male): 区别雄性和雌性动物D. (+,-concrete): 区别具体与抽象名词E. (+,-count): 区别可数和物质名词

F. (+,-common): 区别普通名词和专有名词

Syntactic Functions

•In a common sense, nouns are expected to function as the subject or object, which is

inevitably involved with verb and noun phrases.•E.g. A. The boy loved the film.

B. The film loved the boy.

C. The film frightened the boy.D. The boy frightened the film.

•Apparently, the above sentences are all

grammatically acceptable, but take a second look at A and B, you will find that sentence B is

semantically wrong. So love needs an animated noun to work as the subject.

Syntactic Functions

•According to Brown, this is called “selection limit”.

•[A]. NP(…N[+anim…]--NP•[B]. NP—NP(…N[+anim…]…)

•框架A表明，当love的主语名词词组必须含有一个表生命的主题名词，虽然对做宾语的名词词组没有限制。而框架B表明，frighten的宾语名词词组必须有一个表生命的名词主体，但对主语的名词词组无限制。

•综上，这意味着我们必须从句法特征来指定名词，然后动词的指定必须围绕着名词特征来考虑。