English Noun Inflections

Noun paradigms

Where the verb stem may stand alone as an infinitive (e.g. ‘to pull’) imperative (e.g. ‘pull!’), or general present form (e.g. ‘I/you pull’), the noun stem may only stand alone as a singular noun. Noun paradigms have two forms: a stem form, which is normally the singular, and a plural form, which normally adds an ‘s’.

Declension

Inflection of nouns in English is called declension. Noun paradigms inflect for number but not for gender or case. For example, the singular ‘chair’ takes the suffix ‘s’ to become ‘chairs’: the number of chairs has clearly increased. If the speaker wants to talk about the leg of the chair, the word ‘of’ should be used to avoid adding an apostrophe ‘s’ (the possessive suffix) i.e. ‘the ‘chair’s leg’, as possessives should preferably not be used for inanimate objects.

If a possessive is used with the word ‘it’, then there is no apostrophe. For example, ‘The dog knew its own name’, ‘Justice is its own reward’, ‘The door came off its hinges’.

If an apostrophe is used with ‘it’, this becomes a contraction of ‘it is’. For example, ‘It's time to go out’, ‘The computer won’t start because it’s broken’.

Some noun stems take different inflectional affixes or none at all. For example:

	The word ‘mouse’ becomes ‘mice’ in the plural and does not take the suffix ‘s’
	The word ‘sheep’ stays the same in the plural without taking any affix
	The word ‘medium’ becomes ‘media’ in the plural, here losing the ‘um’ ending and replacing it with ‘a’ (this word is derived from Latin)
	The word ‘fungus’ becomes ‘fungi’ and the word ‘cactus’ becomes ‘cacti’ in the plural (but strangely, ‘octopus’ changes to the regular ‘octopuses’)

Nouns ending with ‘y’ often lose the ‘y’ and take ‘ies’ to make a plural, for example, ‘charity’ becomes ‘charities’. (Be careful not to confuse this with the possessive ‘charity’s’).

So, the English noun has only two inflected forms: inflection due to number (plural) and inflection due to possession (the genitive case).

Gender in English Nouns

Despite nouns being generally non-gendered in English grammar, the third person singular pronouns can indicate gender. So, the words ‘he’ and ‘she’ are gendered, although ‘it’ is not. Because of this, the gender of a person is always communicated when using a pronoun. For example in the sentence, ‘the chef cooked the meal; she did a good job’, the gender of the chef is clearly female, by the use of the word ‘she’. However, the plural pronouns, such as ‘everybody’, ‘somebody’, ‘the public’, are not gendered.

There is some controversy over which word to use for the pronoun’s antecedent in sentence where the third person singular is needed but is of indeterminate gender. For example, ‘Did everybody set … alarm today?’ where the dots indicate a missing word which formally is supposed to be ‘his’ but as the receiver could be female, this seems in the modern day to be wrong. Many people use the word ‘their’ in its place, or sometimes ‘his / her’.

Nouns can be gendered but not by use of inflection, instead, different words are used. For example: mother, father, uncle, niece, actress, Lord, Dame, doe, bull, witch. We know the gender of the people and animals here not by the word itself and not by the use of any inflectional affixes. We can have unisex nouns. For example: child, parent, sibling, cook, runner, mouse.

Possession and the Genitive case

The possessive case or genitive case uses the inflection ‘‘s’ at the end of the noun to indicate possession, for example, ‘the woman’s coat’. The possession can also be indicated by the ‘‘s’ being attached to another word but still in relation grammatically to the subject. For example, ‘the woman over there’s coat’. The coat belongs to the woman, yet the word ‘there’ in this instance takes the suffix.

If a possessive is used with the word ‘it’, then there is no apostrophe. For example, ‘The dog wagged its tail’, ‘Justice is its own reward’, ‘The door came off its hinges’.

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