Content

Introduction

Chapter I Morphological features of nouns

1.1 Classification of nouns in English

1.2 Morphological characteristics of Nouns

1.3 Morphological composition of Nouns

Chapter II Comparison of Nouns in English and Russian languages

2.1 The category of number of Nouns in English and in Russian languages

2.2 The category of case of Nouns in English and in Russian language

2.3 The functions of Nouns in English and in Russian languages

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix

Introduction

Topicality

Language is a social phenomenon and every language has its own grammar. For many centuries such famous scholars as B. Illyish, M. Y. Blokh, O. Jesperson and many others had investigated the problem of parts of speech, that causes great controversies both in general linguistic theory and in the analysis of separate languages. And the main question that had interested them was noun as a part of speech.

The word "noun" comes from the Latin nomen meaning "name." Word classes like nouns were first described by Sanskrit grammarian Panini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax, and defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns can be inflected for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative. Verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected for tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns cannot. [14, 31]

In traditional school grammars, one often encounters the definition of nouns that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition. It has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. Part of the problem is that the definition makes use of relatively general nouns ("thing," "phenomenon," "event") to define what nouns are. The existence of such general nouns shows us that nouns are organized in taxonomic hierarchies.[10, 67]

In the prevailing Modern English terminology the terms "noun" and "substantive" are used as synonyms. According to an earlier view, the term "noun" was understood to cover all nominal parts of speech, including substantives, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals, thus corresponding to the Russian term имя.

According to the existence of differences and similarities in English and in Russian we had revealed in our course paper the morphological features of nouns, it’s classification and had done the comparison between English and Russian languages, which are important for Modern English.

The theme of our course paper is "Comparison of nouns in English and Russian languages".

The aim of investigation is to give more understandable and interesting information about the nouns in English and Russian languages and to find out similarities and differences between them.

Object: the category of case and number of nouns in English and Russian

Subject: the grammar of English and Russian languages

The objectives of investigation are follows:

1.  To gather as much materials out of different sources (scientific books, curriculum guidelines, teachers' magazines, etc.) as it is required.

2.  To study and analyze the work of different linguists;

3.  To reveal the importance of the nouns in English grammar.

4.  To investigate similarities and differences in English and Russian languages.

5.  Using more examples to compare nouns in English and Russian languages.

Hypothesis: we suppose that nouns are important and if we want to achieve the proficiency we should take into account that noun have their own morphological and semantically features. Teachers will use them in their teaching process.

Practical value: by comparing the nouns in English and Russian languages we want to give more examples which show similarities and differences of nouns in English and Russian languages.

Theoretical value: the final outcome of our investigation can be developed in scientific and diploma work. And they can be used as a source of preparing lectures for Theoretical grammar.

Methods of investigation:

1.  contrastive method

2.  descriptive method

3.  analytical method

The scientific novelty is: we had found out differences and similarities in case system and grammatical category of number of nouns in English and Russian languages. English distinguishes two numbers: singular and plural as Russian. Case system of Russian language is more developed than in English.

The bases of our work are resource center and libraries.

The structure of our course paper: Introduction, Topicality, the theoretical part, the practical part, Conclusion, Bibliography and Appendix.

The theoretical part includes:

Classification of nouns in English

Morphological characteristics of Nouns

Morphological composition of Nouns

The practical part includes:

The category of number of Nouns in English and in Russian languages

The category of case of Nouns in English and in Russian languages

The functions of Nouns in English and in Russian languages

Chapter I Morphological features of nouns

1.1 Classification of nouns in English

Proper nouns and common nouns

Proper nouns (also called proper names) are the names of unique entities. ............