Declension

8 Key excerpts on "Declension"

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  eBook - ePub

  Sanskrit Grammar

  • William Dwight Whitney(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER IV.

  _______ Declension.

  261. The general subject of Declension includes nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, all of which are inflected in essentially the same manner. But while the correspondence of nouns and adjectives is so close that they cannot well be separated in treatment (chap. V.), the pronouns, which exhibit many pecularities, will be best dealt with in a separate chapter (VII.); and the words designating number, or numerals, also form a class peculiar enough to require to be presented by themselves (chap. VI.).

  262. Declensional forms show primarily case and number; but they also indicate gender — since, though the distinctions of gender are made partly in the stem itself, they also appear, to no inconsiderable extent, in the changes of inflection.

  263. Gender. The genders are three, namely masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in the other older Indo-European languages; and they follow in general the same laws of distribution as, for example, in Greek and Latin.

  a. The only words which show no sign of gender-distinction are the personal pronouns of the first and second person (491), and the numerals above four (483).

  264.

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  Routledge Revivals: An Outline of Anglo-Saxon Grammar (1936)

  Published as an Appendix to "An Anglo-Saxon Reader"

  • James W. Bright(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Inflection.

  Declension of Nouns.

  In Indo-European, the classes of nouns differed from each other by having distinctive formative suffixes, to which were added case-endings. Thus some nouns were made of stem + o + case ending (e.g., s in the nominative, m in the accusative). Others were made by the addition of ā and case endings to the stem. A third type added i and case endings. A fourth had no vowel-suffix but added the case endings directly to the stem; a fifth used u as its suffix before the addition of the case endings. In each individual language soundlaws might change the appearance of these formative suffixes. For instance, though Greek preserves the o of the first class (e.g., logos ), in Sanscrit it became a , in Latin before s and u it became u , and in Germanic it became a . Thus the -a stems of Anglo-Saxon correspond to the first Declension of Latin. In the second Declension Latin kept ā as ā (tabulā -), but Germanic changed it to ō . The i stems of Anglo-Saxon correspond to those third Declension nouns in Latin which had -ium in the genitive plural (e.g., hostis , which is cognate to A. S. gæest ). The fourth kind of nouns (consonant stems) in Latin are those nouns of the third Declension which had -um in the genitive plural (e.g., rēx ). The u stems of Anglo-Saxon correspond to nouns of the fourth Declension in Latin. The fact that the original case endings rarely appear in Anglo-Saxon is due to the fading away of final sounds which is the result of careless utterance, and which occurs in most languages in course of centuries; e.g., since Anglo-Saxon times final vowels in polysyllables have entirely disappeared.

  The a -Declexsion. (S. §§ 235–250.)

  20. The a -Declension (which includes the stems in -ja and -wa ) represents the inflection of the greater number of the masculine and the neuter nouns.

  MASCULINE a -STEMS .

  21 . (a ) Monosyllabic themes: stān (Germanic *stainas > -az; ai > ā ), stone; dæg , day ; weal(l) , wall ; mearh , horse .

  NOTE . — Sing. D.I. forms without ending are found rarely, e.g., hām, dæg

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  Russian and Slavic Grammar

  Studies 1931-1981

  • Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh, Morris Malle, Linda R. Waugh, Morris Malle(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In the subsequent discussion, we shall make use of the following abbrevia-tions: N(ominative case), G(enitive case), D(ative case), Accusative case), Instrumental case), L(ocative case); sg. (singular), pi. (plural);m. (masculine gender), n. (neuter gender), f. (feminine gender); anim. (animate being), inan. (inanimate entity). 106 CHAPTER SEVEN II 1. Traditional surveys of Declension are reducible to the following types of inventories: 1) a listing of the existing cases; 2) a listing of the contextual meanings characteristic of each given case in the various contexts in which it occurs; 3) a listing of the case forms grouped into paradigms: each paradigm indicates that a given complex of case endings enters into combination with a particular set of grammatical stems. In addition to these lists some observers (for example Trager) enumerate all the forms in which each separate case ending in the Russian Declensional system occurs. 3 All of the above types of enumeration provide indispensable preparatory material for grammatical analysis. 2. One of the fundamental concepts in the development of modern linguistics was the idea of in variance, first recognized by the Kazan' school at the close of the 1870s, simultaneously and in parallel with the success of the same idea in mathematics. Whereas the first stage of these new inquiries in linguistics gave birth to the theory of the phoneme, i.e., of the invariant on the level of sound variations, now the urgent need has arisen to establish and explicate grammatical invariants. Linguistics has for a long time set apart from each other the two grammatical domains of syntax and morphology — and rightly so — and moreover, has drawn a basic distinction between gram-mar and lexicon.

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  A Typological Perspective on Latvian Grammar

  • Andra Kalnaca(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Open Poland

    (Publisher)

  1 Paradigmatics and the Declension of Nouns

  The main focus in this noun description is the paradigm of the noun as well as its case and gender. These issues have been selected first and foremost because the paradigm of the declinable parts of speech of the Latvian language has been insufficiently revealed in theoretical overviews that refer in particular to the structure of parts of speech and the range of the means used to express the grammatical meaning in their paradigms. The noun paradigm is directly connected with the number of cases and the interpretation of their functions in Latvian. Secondly, these issues also have been selected because the Latvian system of noun cases is markedly polyfunctional which means that, alongside the syncretism of endings, noun cases also display curious tendencies of syntactical use and semantic structure that accordingly deserves a more detailed analysis. Thirdly, the use of noun genders is also polyfunctional in Latvian, so they can display various asymmetric uses of noun form and content. In order to make the noun paradigm as well as the case and gender function analysis more explicit, the paradigm of all six Declensions is presented in Section 1.2 .

  1.1 Introductory Remarks on Paradigmatics

  The basis of any morphological paradigm is a set of forms linked through formal and semantic opposition, for example, the paradigm of the seven, grammatically distinct noun cases in Latvian (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative, see in detail Section 1.2 ) and the paradigm of the six grammatically marked verb tense forms (present indefinite, past indefinite, future indefinite, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect – in detail see Chapter 2 ), etc.

  It is considered that the aforementioned paradigms are the centre of the morphological paradigm structure. The periphery of the morphological paradigm structure is formed by various deviations from the aforementioned principle, i.e., syncretism, merging, or the lack of paradigm elements.

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  Biblical Aramaic and Related Dialects

  An Introduction

  • Edward Cook(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Nouns and Adjectives Inflection and Derivation §80. Word formation has two components: derivation and inflection. Derivation refers to the formation of the lexical base of nouns and verbs, and inflection refers to the addition of suffixes or prefixes to express gender, person, number and (in verbs) tense, aspect, and mood. The relatively simpler system of nominal/adjectival inflections will be introduced, followed by a survey of the various and complex groups of nominal/adjectival derivations. INFLECTIONAL SYSTEM OF NOUNS AND ADJECTIVES §81. Nouns and adjectives have the same inflections for gender, number, and state and may be treated together. Although some derivational patterns tend to appear mainly with adjectives, there is no morphological difference in the inflection of nouns and adjectives. Adjectives have no inherent grammatical gender and assume the gender of the noun that they modify. For the syntax of the adjective, see §§145, 171ff. The order of inflectional suffixes (endings) on the noun is (1) derivational, (2) inflectional, (3) pronominal. That is, any sufformatives that are part of the word base occur before any of the inflectional endings outlined below. DeclensionS §82. Noun inflection is organized into Declensions. The term Declension refers to a pattern of noun inflectional suffixes that go together in a systematic paradigm. In Aramaic, there are two Declensions. All nouns and adjectives are inflected, although sometimes the inflection will be a “significant zero,” i.e., nothing will be added to the lexical base. The inflections simultaneously express the three categories of gender, number, and state by means of suffixes. 4 52 52 §83. Gender. a. All nouns and adjectives are of either masculine or feminine gender. “Gender” as a morphological category marks sexual differentiation in the case of nouns referring to humans and animals, but is formally applied to all nominal forms both animate and inanimate.

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  Old Church Slavonic Grammar

  • Horace G. Lunt(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Only substantives have an inherent, unchanging gender (mas-culine, feminine, or neuter). Other nouns have variable (or syntactic) gen-der, changing to agree with the substantives they modify in a given senten-ce. There are two types: pronouns do NOT follow the nominal Declension, but have a special set of forms we call pronominal Declension. Adjectives may follow the nominal Declension and/or a compound Declension com- 4.021-4.04 Declension 53 bining elements of nominal and pronominal Declension. Finally, there is the anomalous group of personal pronouns, which have no formal means of expressing gender, and which follow completely idiosyncratic declen-sions. 4.0211 A handful of words without Declension or gender are defined as adjectives be-cause of their syntactical use and their meanings: e.g. isplwib 'full', svobodb 'free', razliSb 'different' . They all have synonyms which are inflected as adjectives (e.g./?/wis, svobodmb, 4.03 The types of substantival Declension generally correspond to gen-der, but there are outstanding exceptions. The dominant inflection-class, called here twofold nominal Declension includes: (1) a masculine-neuter type and (2) a feminine type [with a few masculine members], both of which (a) may be used for adjectives as well as substantives, (b) have desinence-variants according to the palatal or non-palatal character of the stem-final consonant, and (c) are productive. Another inflection-class, (3) the simple nominal Declension, is restricted to substantives, most of them feminine. A series of minor types may be subsumed under this simple nominal Declension, and called its anomalous subtype. Pronominal stems belong to another paradigm, (4) the pronominal Declension . Determined or compound adjectives have desinences combining those of (1+2 and 4); this paradigm may be called the compound or adjectival Declension. The gender and Declensional type of a substantive can usually be determined from the nom.

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  Noun Phrase Structure in the Languages of Europe

  • Frans Plank(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Frans Plank The selective elaboration of nominal or pronominal inflection 1. Variable extents and domains of inflection Languages with inflection may differ in HOW MUCH of it they have and WHERE they have whatever they have of it. Some inflecting languages have few inflectional categories, possibly only person and number, while others have many, possibly including case, state, possession, gen-der or class, animacy, topicality, switch reference, definiteness, specificity, politeness or formality, distance, location, direction or orientation, comparison, tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, negation, diathesis, inversion, valency, finiteness, or a few oth-ers. While some of these inflectional categories are invariably realized by only a few terms in all languages which share them, others vary considerably. Thus, while switch reference, definiteness, or inversion rarely get beyond the minimum of two terms (same subject, different subject, with different subject sometimes differenti-ated further; definite, indefinite, with definite sometimes differentiated further; di-rect, inverse), case ranges from two terms to about two dozen (with case systems arguably expanding along a rather limited number of dimensions). 1 After categories and terms, the exponents expressing them are a third parameter for quantitative vari-ation: a given term or term bundle (say, nominative plural) may be expressed by only a single exponent in one language and by several synonymous ones in another; and the exponents of two or more terms or term bundles (say, nominative plural and genitive singular) may be distinct in one language and homonymous in another. 2 Some languages have inflection almost everywhere: on verbs, auxiliaries, nouns, pronouns, articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, adjectives, adverbs, and even on ad-positions and conjunctions, or also on units other than words.

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  Using Russian

  A Guide to Contemporary Usage

  • Derek Offord(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  9 Inflection Russian is a highly inflected language. Meaning is much more dependent on the ending of words and less dependent on word order than is the case in English. Without a thorough knowledge of the many flexions used on Russian nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals and verbs it is impossible not only to speak and write Russian correctly but even to arrive at an accurate understanding of what one hears or reads. However, the difficulty of learning the numerous flexions is not so great as seems at first to be the case if the learner keeps in mind the distinction between hard and soft consonants and the spelling rules listed in 8.2.1 and 8.2.4 and takes the trouble to study the basic Declensional and conjugational patterns set out in this chapter. 9.1 Declension of the noun The Russian Declensional system has six cases and distinguishes between singular and plural. The six cases are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental and prepositional. There is a very small number of relics of the vocative case and dual number (see Glossary). Some nouns exist only in a plural form (e.g. су ´ тки ), at least in certain meanings (e.g. чaсы ´ , clock ; 3.6.1 ). Some nouns borrowed from other languages are indeclinable ( 9.1.12 ). 9.1.1 Gender The gender of most nouns is easily determined: masculine (a) all nouns ending in a hard consonant, e.g. стол ; (b) all nouns ending in -й , e.g. музe ´ й ; (c) a minority of nouns ending in -ь , especially: i. all those denoting males, e.g. зять , son-in-law or brother-in-law ; ii. nouns ending in the suffix -тeль (see 8.7.1 ), e.g. покупa ´ тeль , shopper ; (d) some nouns in -a and -я which denote males or people who may be of either sex, e.g. мужчи ´ нa , man ; дя ´ дя , uncle ; слугa ´, servant . neuter (a) most nouns in -o , e.g. окно ´, window ; (b) most nouns in -e , e.g. мо ´ рe , sea ; упрaжнe ´ ниe , exercise ; except подмaстe ´ рьe , apprentice (m); (c) all nouns in -¨ e , e.g.

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