Pluralia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a plural and no singular form. Here
belong the names of “two-part” items (
trousers ,
scissors ,
binoculars ,
jeans , etc) and nouns of
indefinite plurality (
annals ,
amends ,
auspices ,
congratulations ,
dregs ,
outskirts ,
remains ,
thanks ,
tropics , etc). There are also a few nouns which look singular but are always plural (
vermin ,
people ,
livestock , etc).
Singularia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a singular and no
plural form. In fact, they are uncountable, because they denote material substance (
air ,
milk ,
oxygen ,
oil , etc) or abstract notions (
peace ,
usefulness ,
music , etc). However, such nouns may
become countable if they are used to denote objects made of the material (
iron — irons ), or special
kinds of the substance (
wine — wines ), or objects/persons exhibiting the quality denoted by the
noun (
beauty — beauties ).
Noun: Category of Case The problem of case in Modern English nouns is one of the most difficult problems in
English grammar. The traditional view presented in most practical grammars is that English nouns
have two cases: a common case (e. g.
father ) and a possessive or genitive case (e. g.
father’s ).
However, there are some other views which can be divided into two main groups: 1) the number
of cases in English is more than two; 2) there are no cases at all in Modern English nouns. The
classical definition of the grammatical category of case reads:
“Case is the category of a noun expressing relations between the thing denoted by the noun and
other things, or properties, or actions, and manifested by some formal sign in the noun itself ”.
This sign is almost always an inflection, and it may also be a zero sign i. e. the grammatically
meaningful absence of any sign. It is obvious that the minimal number of case forms in a given
language system is two because at least two grammatically correlated elements are needed to
establish a category. Thus case is a part of the morphological system of a language. With this
erpretation in view, it is hardly possible to accept the theories which hold that case may also be
expressed by prepositions or by the word order. It is the position of Max Deutschbein and some
other scholars that Modern English nouns have four cases, viz. nominative, genitive, dative and
accusative, of which the genitive case is expressed by the -‘
s inflection and by the preposition
of ,
the dative — by the preposition
to and also by the word order, and the accusative is distinguished
from the dative by the word order alone. But there is a contradiction here pointed out by B. A.
Ilyish. He says that once we admit prepositions, or word order, or any other non-morphological
means of expressing case, the number of cases may grow indefinitely. There may be an
instrumental case expressed by the preposition
with , or a locative case expressed by the preposition
in , or any other case. That view would mean abandoning the idea of the morphological category
of case and confusing wordforms with syntactic phenomena. It seems obvious that the two-case
system (the common case and the possessive case) is a reasonable choice from the morphological
point of view. It should be kept in mind, however, that the possibility of forming the possessive
case, also referred to as s-genitive, is limited to English nouns denoting living beings (first of all,
person nouns, e. g.