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23. The four major grammatical categories: name them and briefly characterize their semantic, morphological and syntactic properties

The term grammatical category refers to a group of elements recognized in the description of particular languages

GENDER: as English has a natural gender, this nominal grammatical category does not play such an important role in the English grammar

Due to the fact that there is no gender concord in English, no special suffixes are used to indicate gender distinctions

There are only a few exceptions for instance the suffix –ess (stewardess, actress) and the suffix –ette (usherette

Generally animate personal female nouns have feminine gender, animate personal male nouns have masculine gender and inanimate non-personal objects, things, phenomena are neuter in gender

So gender in English is mainly derived from a biological distinction between male and female

NUMBER: it refers to a system of special forms which show whether one or more than one is spoken about

This nominal grammatical category is based on binary opposition singular vs plural. English used to have the dual number in the Old English period

. The distinction between the singular and the plural is indicated by the absence or presence of the plural morpheme –s and its allomorphs –en (oxen), -es (analysis-analyses), -a (datum-data)

The grammatical category of number is closely related to the division of nouns into countable which have plural forms stated above, and uncountable nouns i.e. abstract nouns, material nouns (information, sugar etc.

CASE: the nominal category of case is a variation in forms of a word according to the its syntactical function

Cases include genitive (marks a noun as modifying another noun), dative (is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to which something is given

accusative (the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb

nominative: the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb

DEFINITENESS/INDEFINITENESS: definiteness is a grammatical category playing an important role in respect to category of nouns

In English it is normally expressed by using the definite article, if the idea represented by the noun is supposed to be known from the previous context or to be evident

There are, however, other means of expressing definiteness: the use of proper names (John, London)

demonstrative pronouns (that, these), possessive pronouns (my, our, its)

wh-determiners (which, whose, whatever) and the negative determiner (no)

Indefiniteness in contradiction to definiteness refers to the contextual novelty and aspect of individualizing

If the definite and indefinite articles are used to refer to the whole genus or referents (a cow gives milk, the elephant is a mammal) they are said to have a generic function.