Contrastive Analysis of the Grammatical Category NUMBER in Nouns in the English and Lithuanian Languages

Abstract

Grammatical categories are not expected to be similar in two languages, thus, making problems for translators, interpreters, language learners and people on the whole enjoying the riches of foreign literature. This article deals with the grammatical category NUMBER in the English and Lithuanian languages. Number is distinguished in nouns, pronouns and verbs in English but in nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives in Lithuanian. The article primarily concerns nouns. It is not difficult to observe that the classification of nouns is not and cannot be similar in the two languages which may be the reason why the grammatical category under consideration is different in English and Lithuanian and may cause various misunderstandings. Therefore, characteristic features of the grammatical category NUMBER in both languages will be pointed out so that the differences are easily distinguishable making the understanding of certain grammatical phenomena a lot easier for the readers.