ON THE CATEGORY OF NUMBER OF ABSTRACT NOUNS IN THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Akai Oksana Mikhailovna
Don State Technical University
Abstract. The article aims to examine abstract nouns in the English language from the viewpoint of number theory. Abstract substantives are traditionally interpreted as the nouns incapable to form numerical pair. The author analyzes the functioning of the mentioned substantives in the language and identifies numerical behaviour of this category of nouns from the viewpoint of different quantitativeness theories. Relying on the analysis of the English databases CELEX and LSC the author discovers the immediate interrelation between the lexical corpus and the category of number. The paper focuses on Singularia Tantum nouns and describes in detail the functioning of abstract nouns by the concrete examples from the modern English language.
Key words and phrases: абстрактные существительные, исчисляемость, квазиабстрактность, теория числа, неисчисляемость, abstract nouns, countability, quasi-abstractness, number theory, uncountability
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