Ruth Heller - Merry-Go-Round: A Book About Nouns Книжка для малышей (4-8 лет), в которой при помощи большого количества картинок и очень малого количества стихотворного текста объясняется, какими бывают существительные. Книжка на английском.
Grammatical Number in English Nouns - an Empirical and Theoretical Account
Apart from the coverage given to it in the grammars, number in English nouns has received relatively little attention, especially in the area of theoretical considerations. Guided by the principles of psychomechanics, Hirtle (1982a) put forth a fairly elaborate theory of number in English nouns. The aim of this work is to provide evidence to validate parts of Hirtle's theory, to verify some of his analyses, and to investigate several problems, some of which are mentioned in his work as subjects for further research. Specific areas treated are ailment nouns, liquid names, ending in -ings, binary objects, abstract -s, and external singulars.
This book is intended as an aid in self-study or as supplementary material in regular language classes. Its purpose is to review and codify for the intermediate to advanced student of English the main facts about English nouns - their form and their syntax. Nouns are one of the two most numerous classes of words in the English language, the other being verbs. Their main role, of course, is to name things - objects, people, animals, places, substances, and all the rest. As such, their number is as great as the number of such things that speakers want to talk about. Nouns, therefore are a very "productive" word class; new ones are readily coined, and old ones become obsolete and pass away.
