There is not much to be said about the English adjective from the morphological point of view. As is well known, it has neither number, nor case, nor gender distinctions. Some adjectives have, however, degrees of comparison, which make part of the morphological system of a language. Thus, the English adjective differs materially not only from such highly inflected languages as Russian, Latin, and German, where the adjectives have a rather complicated system of forms, but even from Modern French, which has preserved number and gender distinctions to the present day (cf. masculine singular grand, masculine plural grands, feminine singular grande, feminine plural grandes 'large').

It has been a long debated question how many articles there are in English. Obviously there are only two material articles, the definite article the and the indefinite article a (an).

The article presents the student with one of the most difficult and intricate problems of language structure. Although a great number of philologists have treated the article both in English and in other languages, it will be only fair to say that even the most essential points concerning the theory of the articles still remain doubtful.

In Old English, the notions of number and case were always expressed by one morpheme. Thus, in the Old English form stana the ending -a expressed simultaneously the plural number and the genitive case. That was typical of an inflected language.

The problem of case in Modern English nouns is one of the most vexed problems in English grammar.

Certain nouns denoting groups of human beings (family, government, party, clergy, etc.) and also of animals (cattle, poultry, etc.)

We must also consider here two types of nouns differing from all others in the way of number: they have not got the usual two number forms, but only one form. The nouns which have only a plural and no singular are usually termed "pluralia tantum" (which is the Latin for "plural only"), and those which have only a singular and no plural are termed "singularia tantum" (the Latin for "singular only'').

The noun in Modern English has only two grammatical categories, number and case. The existence of case appears to be doubtful and has to be carefully analysed. The Modern English noun certainly has not got the category of grammatical gender, which is to be found, for example, in Russian, French, German and Latin. Not a single noun in Modern English shows any peculiarities in its morphology due to its denoting a male or a female being. Thus, the words husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to the peculiarities of their lexical meanings.

In giving a list of parts of speech, we have not so far mentioned the terms "notional" and "formal".

1. Proceeding in the usual order, we start with the noun, or substantive.3 Its characteristic features are the following.  Meaning: thingness. Thus, nouns include not only chair and iron, etc., but also beauty, peace, necessity, journey, and everything else presented as a thing, or object.