Category of case.

Case indicates the relations of the noun ( or pronoun ) to the other words in the sentence. Nouns denoting living beings and some nouns denoting lifeless things have two cases:

the common case.

the genitive case.

The genitive case is formed by:

‘s – is used with the singular and plural nouns not ending in –s:

a man’s job, men’s job, a child’s voice, a children’s voice.

b) a simple apostrophe (‘)is used with plural nouns ending in –s:

the students’ hostel, the Smiths’ car.

other names ending I –s can take “ ’s ” or the “ ’ ” alone:

The problem of gender.

In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. For example, in the words actor and actress the suffix -or denotes "male person" (masculine), and the suffix -ress denotes "female person" (feminine). This type of inflection, called lexical gender, is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages, including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally, Modern English does not mark nouns for gender, but it expresses gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. Grammatical gender may be partly assigned by convention, so it doesn't always coincide with natural gender. Furthermore, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. Gender can refer to the (biological) condition of being male or female, or less commonly hermaphrodite or neuter, as applied to humans, animals, and plants. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual intercourse.

21. Pronoun

(1) The meaning of the pronoun as a separate part of speech is somewhat

difficult to define. In fact, some pronouns share essential peculiarities of nouns

(e.g. he), while others have much in common with adjectives (e. g. which). This

made some scholars think that pronouns were not a separate part of speech at all

and should be distributed between nouns and adjectives. However, this view

proved untenable and entailed insurmountable difficulties. Hence it has proved

necessary to find a definition of the specific meaning of pronouns, distinguishing 21

them from both nouns and adjectives. From this angle the meaning of pronouns as

a part of speech can be stated as follows: pronouns point to the things and

properties without naming them.

Form. As far as form goes pronouns fall into different types. Some of them

have the category of number (singular and plural), e. g. this, while others have no

such category, e. g. somebody. Again, some pronouns have the category of case (he

— him, somebody — somebody's), while others have none (something).

Function. (a) Some pronouns combine with verbs (he speaks, find him),

while others can also combine with a following noun (this room). (b) In the

sentence, some pronouns may be the subject (he, what) or the object, while others

are the attribute (my). Pronouns can be predicatives.

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