Peter,
There are several ways to approach the problems you astutely raise with the notion "category," two of which involve the discreteness of categories and the exclusivity of membership. We tend to think of categories as boxes, and everything to be classified fits neatly into one box or another, nothing goes into two or more boxes at the same time, and nothing overlaps from one box to another. Your examples, "rain" and "snow," are good examples of why this very narrow understanding of category doesn't work well for language. It's more useful to think in terms of prototypes, that is, clusters of traits that define characteristic members of the category. So a prototypical noun would be, perhaps, a concrete, countable, common noun and a prototypical verb would be a transitive with an agentive subject, or, at least, so Talmy Givon would suggest. "Rain" and "snow" are nice instances of words that are neither prototypical nouns nor prototypical verbs but rather have some traits of both. I don't, and did not, reject the use of semantic criteria in defining categories; rather, I pointed out that since most semantic features do not have grammatical correlates they are not useful in defining categories. Certainly the count-mass continuum is a semantic distinction that has clear morphosyntactic correlates and so is a useful part of the definition of "noun."
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: June 12, 2008 12:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Anthimeria: Hell in a handbasket
Uh oh. Here we go back into the old form/function discussion. If we
use morphosyntactic criteria to place words in word classes, then how
do we handle words like "rain" and "snow"? They seem to fit most of
Herb's criteria: they can be made plural, they can "fall," they can
serve as antecedents, they can be made possessive (even though Herb
didn't include that one).
But they still seem more verb-like than noun-like to me. Is it
possible to identify a words category without context? And if you
need context, doesn't that mean you are using semantic criteria?
Finally, a question I must admit I've asked before on this list, is it
possible that there are two words "rain" and two words "snow." Each
pair is spelled and pronounced exactily alike, but one is a noun and
one is a verb?
Peter
On Jun 11, 2008, at 10:21 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
> We've had some extensive discussion of parts of speech and how to
> identify them. The problem is not whether to define them but how.
> If we claim to have a set of categories, we are obligated to define
> those categories. The more empirically successful ways of defining
> lexical categories, or parts of speech, are those that use
> morphosyntactic criteria supplemented where possible by the rather
> slipperier semantic criteria. Unfortunately, notional semantic
> criteria frequently have no grammatical correlates and therefore
> tell us nothing about how a class of words works in a language.
> Morphosyntactic criteria are by definition grammatical, since they
> use only grammatical features in their definitions. A noun, for
> example, is a word that can be made plural, usually by adding -s.
> Some nouns, like "beer' do not become plural but rather become
> individuated, meaning "several instances of ..." It can also be
> described as a word that can occur in the frame "The ____ fell." It
> can also serve as the antecedent of a pronoun, and there are further
> features we could add.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN 47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]
> ] On Behalf Of Peter Adams [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: June 11, 2008 12:40 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Anthimeria: Hell in a handbasket
>
> Definitions have all the vices Jesperson and Ed complain of, for
> sure. And yet, how my students cry out for them. They seem to
> think, and they may be right, that being able to sort things--words,
> for instance,--into categories is a necessary step on the path to
> using them effectively.
>
> By the way, I've always wondered why Lowth and almost every handbook
> author since want to say a noun is the NAME of something. My
> students find that definition very confusing when they come to learn
> what proper nouns are . . . names of things in a different sense.
> Perhaps it would be clearer for novices to say nouns are words that
> represent . . . persons, places, things, abstract ideas, anything
> that exists. The last part is the hard part, but I've always
> resisted saying nouns are names.
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
> On Jun 11, 2008, at 12:28 PM, Edgar Schuster wrote:
>
> Bill (and others),
> For what it's worth---and I'm not sure it's worth much---I have
> a Murray definition of noun as "the name of any thing that exists,
> or of which we have any notion." Lowth wrote "the Name of a thing;
> of whatever we conceive in any way to subsist, or of which we have
> any notion."
> Maybe this comment from Otto Jespersen is worth a lot more: "If
> there is one thing I dislike in grammar, it is definitions (of parts
> of speech) too often met with in our textbooks. They are neither
> exhaustive nor true; they have not, and cannot have, the precision
> and clearness of the definitions found in textbooks of
> mathematics . . . . And thus we might go on to the definitions
> found even in the best grammars: they are unsatisfactory, all of
> them, and I do not think they are necessary."
> The English Journal [!!!], 1924
>
> Ed Schuster
>
>
> **************
> Vote for your city's best dining and nightlife. City's Best 2008.
> (http://citysbest.aol.com?ncid=aolacg00050000000102) To join or
> leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> = To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
> interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and
> select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
> interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
