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
Nouns that can
be Countable and Uncountable
Sometimes, the
same noun can be countable and uncountable, often with a change of meaning.
Countable
Uncountable
There are two hairs in my coffee!
hair
I don't have much hair.
There are two lights in our bedroom.
light
Close the curtain. There's too much light!
Shhhhh! I thought I heard a noise.
noise
It's difficult to work when there is too much noise.
Have you got a paper to read? (= newspaper)
paper
I want to draw a picture. Have you got some paper?
Our house has seven rooms.
room
Is there room for me to sit here?
We had a great time at the party.
time
Have you got time for a coffee?
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's greatest works.
work
I have no money. I need work!
Uncountable
Nouns
Uncountable
nouns are substances, concepts etc that we cannot divide into separate
elements. We cannot "count" them. For example, we cannot count
"milk". We can count "bottles of milk" or "litres of
milk", but we cannot count "milk" itself. Here are some more
uncountable nouns:
Countable
Nouns
Countable
nouns are easy to recognize. They are things that we can count. For example:
"pen". We can count pens. We can have one, two, three or more pens.
Here are some more countable nouns:
·
Prepositions: за '(what) kind of?' Что он за человек?
What kind of person is he? в: 'join the ranks of* (PI. only) вступить в коммунисты Join the
communists.
·
Predicates of connective
verbs (быть, стать, остаться, казаться, оказаться): Он был студентом.
·
Second Direct Objects Его
считают студентом.
·
Prepositions of
position: за, перед, над, под, между, с
·
Adjectives: довольный
чем-то
Number
English plurals end in -s. In Russian,
there are more endings to make plurals. They
are all summed up in the table:
Noun
type
Ending for plural
Example
masculine ending in a hard consonant; feminine
ending in -a
-ы
стол - столы
any nouns ending in -ь, -й, -я
-и
двeрь - двери
masculine and feminine ending in -k, -г, -x, -ч, -щ, -ж, -ш,
-и
нога - ноги
neuter ending in -o
-a
окно - окнa
neuter ending in -e
-я
мoре - моря
There are some
plurals which have been borrowed from foreign nouns:
Singular
Plural
Latin
agendum
agenda
datum
data
dictum
dicta
erratum
errata
memorandum
memoranda
medium
media
stratum
strata
focus
foci
formula
formulae
fungus
fungi
genus
genera
axis
axes
appendix
appendices
series
series
species
species
Singular
Plural
Greek
analysis
analyses
basis
bases
crisis
crises
hypothesis
hypotheses
parenthesis
parentheses
thesis
theses
phenomenon
phenomena
criterion
criteria
Singular
Plural
French
beau
beaux (or beaus)
bureau
bureaux
monsieur
messieurs
madame
mesdames
Modality plays
a great role in the person’s speech, as it expresses speaker’s attitudes to
actions of other people. In our diploma paper we analyzed modality as
expressions of social power, morphological and semantic features of modal verbs
as they express modality.
We have
proposed to view the core meanings of the modal verbs as determined by the
power structure of the speech act situation where they are used. We have found
that the different participants’ expectations about each other’s attitudes
combined with the social power structure largely determine the usage, and there
by the semantics of modals. Our general semantic approach should, however, be
applicable to all languages with modal verbs.
Modal verbs
take a special place in grammar, but they are also examined by semantic
science. That’s why disagreement appeared between grammar and semantic
sciences. Now modal verbs are the subject of grammar, which consider not only
the structural characteristics, but also studies semantic loading of modal
verbs.
The category
of modal verbs include request, order, imperative, command, approval,
disapproval, reproach, an opportunity, skill, a duty, a prediction, the
assumption and etc.
In our diploma paper we also analyzed semantic features of modal verbs.
We have found out that modal verbs are concerned defective as many modal verbs
have no form of future time, they have the equivalents among nominal verbs. In
this connection, equivalents of modal verbs in our work have involved in the
separate semantic analysis.
Drawing
conclusion of our work, we can tell, that each modal verb and its equivalents
have several values. These values frequently coincide with values of other
modal verbs, but have the own special characteristic, each of characteristics
proves to be true from examples in colloquial and literary speech.
