In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: "semantic", "formal", and "func-tional". The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalised meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is un-derstood as the "categorial meaning of the part of speech". The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific in-flexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech. The said three factors of categorial characterisa-tion of words are conventionally referred to as, respectively, "meaning", "form", and "function".
2. In accord with the described criteria, words on the upper level of classification are divided into notional and functional, which reflects their division in the earlier grammatical tradition into changeable and unchangeable.
To the notional parts of speech of the English language be-long the noun, the adjective, the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb.
The features of the noun within the identificational triad "meaning form function" are, correspondingly, the fol-lowing: 1) the categorial meaning of substance ("thingness"); 2) the changeable forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation (prefixes in English do not discriminate parts of speech as such); 3) the substantive functions in the sen-tence (subject, object, substantival predicative); prepositional connections; modification by an adjective.
The features of the adjective: 1) the categorial meaning of property (qualitative and relative); 2) the forms of the degrees of comparison (for qualitative adjectives); the specific suffixal forms of derivation; 3) adjectival functions in the sen-tence (attribute to a noun, adjectival predicative).
6. The noun semantic, formal, functional characteristics. A noun is a part of speech typically denoting a person, place, thing, animal, or idea.
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of aclause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.[1]
Lexical categories are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntacticrules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.Definitions of nouns
Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they are subject (classed by gender, inflected for case and number). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since nouns do not have the same categories in all languages.
Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties (their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.[6]
Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other lexical categories) in terms of their formal properties. These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also theirsyntax how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types. Such definitions may nonetheless still be language-specific, since syntax as well as morphology varies between languages. For example, in English it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as stated at the start of this article), but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.
