HANOI UNIVERSITY DISTANCE EDUCATION CENTER (DEC) ASSIGNMENT TOPIC 1 Nouns Syntactic functions of Nouns in English sentences Lecturer Nguyen Thu Hien, M A Student 1 Nguyen Van A Student’s ID Student 2[.]
HANOI UNIVERSITY DISTANCE EDUCATION CENTER (DEC) ASSIGNMENT TOPIC 1: Nouns: Syntactic functions of Nouns in English sentences Lecturer: Nguyen Thu Hien, M.A Student 1: Nguyen Van A - Student’s ID: Student 2: Tran Thi B – Student’s ID: … Hanoi, 2022 STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This is to certify that to the best of our knowledge, the content of this paper is our own work This paper has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes We certify that the intellectual content of this paper is the product of our own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this paper and sources have been acknowledged Date: _ Group’s leader: _ Students’ signatures: _ I INTRODUCTION In a majority of languages, nouns are usually an indispensable part of forming cohesive texts and speeches For English, this statement is even more prominent as nouns, alongside verbs and adjectives, are the most common parts of speech to form sentences Furthermore, nouns also account for the most significant class of words in countless languages, and English is not an exception (Definition of NOUN, 2019) In English, nouns usually act as either the subject or object in sentences In other cases, they can also serve as a complement, attribute, and so on (NOUNS, n.d.) This essay will examine the nouns provided in this assigned article and their syntactic functions ARTICLE 10 Britain's King Charles to miss climate summit (6th October, 2022) https://breakingnewsenglish.com/2210/221006-king-charles-iii.html Britain's King Charles III is a well-known environmentalist For decades, he has spoken on green issues He made the world aware of the dangers of climate change long before many world leaders did He had been invited to attend the 27th UN climate change conference in Egypt next month to give a speech However, officials say there has been a change of plan and he will not be attending Many newspapers in the U.K say King Charles will not attend the conference after Britain's new prime minister, Liz Truss, advised him not to A royal expert told a newspaper that: "It is no mystery that the King was invited to go there He had to think very carefully about what steps to take for his first overseas tour." Many newspapers in England are reporting that Liz Truss did not want the new King to attend COP 27 because he disagrees with her government on climate change Ms Truss became prime minister four weeks ago She has already lifted a ban on fracking in the U.K Fracking was banned in the U.K because of the risk of environmental damage and the possibility of earthquakes King Charles has a history of "declaring war" on climate change At COP21 in Paris in 2015, he called for a "vast military-style campaign" and "trillions, not billions, of dollars" to fight it U.S President Biden praised King Charles' leadership on climate change He said: "We need you badly." II BODY First and foremost, in terms of classification, a wide array of nouns can be found in the given article Right at the beginning, the article opens with a proper noun “Britain's King Charles III” This is a title that distinguishes Charles III as a person of royal blood, which directly separates him from people of inferior classes To be more specific, Charles III is the reigning King of Britain, the foremost position in the royal family (Order of Precedence in England and Wales, n.d.) Next, this noun is defined as “a well-known environmentalist”, a collective and countable noun Here, the article “a”, followed by the adjective “well-known”, is used to determine that this is a singular noun along with its state “Environmentalist”, the main noun, refers to the side occupation of the said King (Learn.org -, n.d.) Another notable proper noun is “Liz Truss” in the sentence “Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, advised him not to” This is defined as so because “Liz Truss” is a full name of a woman whose job is the “Britain’s new prime minister” After this, other countable nouns, “decades” and “green issues”, albeit plural ones, can be found For these words, the former is a one-word noun comprising of only the word “decade” in its plural form, while the latter is a compound one, which is created from the word “issue” in its plural form with the additional adjective “green” Both of these are abstract nouns since a decade, a span of 10 years and “issues” are intangible concepts Moreover, they can also be classified as common nouns as they are used to indicate certain aspects An example of an uncountable noun can be found in the word “leadership” near the end of the article This is also an abstract noun referring to a certain trait of people and is unquantifiable Secondly, regarding the formation of nouns, this article also hosts all four major types of this characteristic of nouns For example, the aforementioned word “environmentalist” is a derived noun Specifically, this noun is formed by adding the suffix “-ist” to the root word “environmental”, an adjective Moving on, nouns such as “change” and “plan” exemplify converted nouns as both of them can also act as a verb without being altered by an affix For example, simple words like “he changes” and “his changes” are valid despite the fixed structure of the word “changes” Moreover, the noun “newspaper” represents a compound noun (What Is a Compound Word? (with Pictures), n.d.) Structurally speaking, this noun is formed from two morphemes, “news” and “paper”, both of which are nouns The last major type of noun formation, shorten ones, can be found in the case of the noun “COP” This is the shortened form of the original words “Conference of the Parties” (Conference of the Parties (COP) | United Nations Development Programme, n.d.) Being pronounced as “cop”, an individual word, this noun can be concluded as a usage of an acronym Thirdly, the nouns in the given article only contain limited gender-based characteristics To be more specific, the given text only uses gender-neutral nouns such as “world leaders”, “officials”, “royal expert”, and so on to refer to occupations These nouns can refer to either males or females, which makes them gender-unspecific To address the sex of the nouns, however, the text mainly uses pronouns like “he” and “she” The only few instances of nouns in which the gender of the nouns can be interpreted without the use of pronouns are “King”, a title mainly held by a man in a monarch (Craughwell, 2012), and the contraction “Ms.”, which refers a woman of unclear marriage status, in “Ms Truss” (Here’s How to Know the Difference between Miss, Mrs., and Ms., and Mx., 2021) Fourthly, to further examine the number-related nouns in the article, several aforementioned, along with novel examples, should be focused on In terms of the plural nouns, their samples can be observed throughout the text Plural nouns such as “decades”, “issues”, “officials”, and “newspapers” are formed by simply adding an inflectional suffix “-s” onto the original singular words In other words, their singular forms are “decade”, “issue”, “official”, and “newspaper”, respectively Next, there are no instances of special plural nouns detected in the text On the other hand, singular nouns are also present in the text “Environmentalist”, “conference”, “newspaper”, and “risk” are some of the noticeable examples They are often linked with articles “a”, “an”, and “the” to express their singular state For the case of “environmentalist”, despite starting with / ɪ /, a vowel sound, this noun is not accompanied by the article “an” This is because this noun is featured with “well-known”, an adjective with a consultant starting sound Therefore, this singular compound noun is written as “a well-known environmentalist” Additionally, the singular noun “government” is a special case as it is a collective noun, which can be linked with either singular or plural verbs (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) Fifthly, inspections regarding the cases of the given nouns can also be made Cases of the three types of noun cases are obvious within the text For nominative case, in which the noun plays the subject of the sentence, the nouns “newspapers” and “a royal expert” are the typical examples within their respective sentences of “Many newspapers in the U.K say …” and “A royal expert told …” Here, the two nouns can be identified as subjects since they both directly perform their correspondent actions (What Is a Subject? Definition, Examples of Subjects in English, n.d._) Moving on, the objective case, in which the noun acts as the object of the sentence, the noun “a ban on fracking” in the sentence “She has already lifted a ban on fracking in the U.K.” is an apparent sample Here, this noun is classified as a direct object because it is acted on by the transitive verb “lifted” (Object, n.d.) In the case of indirect object, the noun “the dangers of climate change” in the sentence “He made the world aware of the dangers of climate change …” can be used as an example This is because this noun directly answers the question of “of what” as in “he made the world aware of what?” Furthermore, for the prepositional object, we have nouns like “what steps to take” and “his first overseas tour” in the full sentence “He had to think very carefully about what steps to take for his first overseas tour” In this very sentence, both of the highlighted nouns follow their individual preposition of “about” and “for” and can be used to answer the question of “what must he think very carefully about?” and “the steps to take for what?” Next, regarding the possessive case, which illustrates possession of the noun, the only present nouns are “Britain’s King Charles III” and “Britain’s new prime minister” The possessive component “Britain’s” appears in both of these examples This component is formed from the base noun “Britain”, followed by an apostrophe and a “-s” suffix This helps indicate that both the “King Charles III” and the “new prime minister” are of Britain Lastly, in terms of syntactic functions, the nouns in the given article also obtain additional roles The very first sentence “Britain's King Charles III is a well-known environmentalist” has two nouns, with the latter being a subject complement (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) Here, the noun “a well-known environmentalist”, which follows the linking verb “is”, helps define the side occupation of the current King of Britain Next, in the analyzed example of the sentence “Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, …”, the proper noun “Liz Truss” acts as an attribute, more specifically, an apposition, to the noun before it To be more specific, “Liz Truss” helps explain who the “Britain’s new prime minister” is; therefore, it can be classified as an attribute (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) As for the noun acting as a part of an adverbial modifier, the noun “four weeks” in the full sentence “Ms Truss became prime minister four weeks ago” can exemplify this Here, this noun is part of the adverbial of time that indicates how long has Ms Truss held her position (Adverbials of Time, 2010) Moreover, nouns such as “Egypt” and “England” in their respective sentence of “… climate change conference in Egypt …” and “Many newspapers in England …” express the location of the noun Indeed, these two popper nouns both follow the preposition “in” to establish the nation from which the “climate change conference” and “many newspapers” originate Thus, they are parts of an adverbial of location (Adverbials of Location, 2010) Moving on, the nouns “the risk of environmental damage” and “the possibility of earthquake” indicate the reasons or causes of their sentence “Fracking was banned in the U.K because of the risk of environmental damage and the possibility of earthquakes” Therefore, they can be classified as parts of an adverbial of cause (Adverb Clauses of Cause or Reason, 2011) Finally, the noun “speech” in the sentence “… to give a speech” is a part of an adverbial of purpose as it explains the reason why the King will be attending the conference (Adverb Clauses of Purpose, 2011) III CONCLUSION In conclusion, the above analysis of the nouns in the assigned 242-word article proves that nouns are not only omnipresent but also bare a multitude of varied functions and characteristics This essay mentions and examines some apparent examples of different angles of noun analysis, from their classification to their syntactic functions (1687 words) REFERENCES Definition of NOUN (2019) Merriam-Webster.com https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noun NOUNS (n.d.) 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