Morphological structure of a word. Classification of Morphemes

7. The Noun. The category of Case.
The noun is the main nominative part of speech, having: 1) the categorial meaning of “substance” & “thingness”.2)The noun is characterized by some formal features: typical suffixes, compound stem models, conversion patterns.3)It has the gram. categories of gender, number, case, article determination. 4)The most characteristic function of the noun is that of the subject in the sentence. function of the object is also typical. Other syntactic functions, i.e. attribute, adverbial & even predicative are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality. 5)The noun is characterized by some special types of combinability. It is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adj., an adv. E.g. an entrance to the house(noun); to turn round the corner(verb); red in the face(adj); far from its destination(adv).
The combinability of case also characterizes the noun alongside of its prepositional combinability with another noun. E.g. the speech of the President - the president's speech. E.nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact. In the contact group the noun in pre-position plays the role of an attribute to the noun in post-position. E.g. film festivals, a cannon ball. The lexico-gram. status of such combinations was a big problem to how to treat this combination: either as one separate compound word or a word-group. “The cannon ball problem” (or the stone wall problem).

The category of case Case is the immanent morphological category of the noun, showing the relations of the object to other objects & phenomena. It is expressed by the opposition of the form in -'s [z, s, iz] usually called the possessive case, or more traditionally, the genitive case, to the unmarked form of the noun, usually called the “common” case.

The ’ serves to distinguish in writing the singular noun in the genitive case from the plural noun in the common case. Phonetically, the genitive of the most nouns in the plural is not expressed (the actresses' dresses) few exceptions of the irregular plurals: e.g., the children's room. But the common case may express the genitive meaning, e.g. the leg of the table. The category became the problems of theoretical discussions.