Herb is surely right about degrees of constraint for the more one deviates,
the more one is demanding of our fellow-speakers.  I think teachers must
still try to avoid giving the impression that he apportionment of function
is a given of any kind outside curent usage.  For the definitions of Noun,
Verb, and we can include Adjective it is important not to fall into the
prejudices about the real that language itself induces.  Useful here to turn
to what Jean Aitchison says in her interesting book The Seeds of Speech:
Language Origin and Evolution (Aitchison, 1996: 133):

 
'Nouns are at one end of a continuum, with words that retain their identity
through time, such as dog, mountain, sky.  Verbs are at the other end, with
words that involve rapid change, such as jump, hit, swim.  In the middle
come properties, some semi-permanent, as in a large elephant, a round pond,
a green frog, and some temporary, as in an angry bull, a happy baby, a hot
day.' (ibid., 132)

 
She then shows how languages differ in this regard, pointing out that there
is an indefinite borderline between nouns and adjectives on the one hand,
and verbs and adjectives on the other.  She thus goes on to illustrate the
point from English:

 'Some adjectives seem more like nouns, as in a gold watch, a tin tray,
others more like verbs, as in a lasting peace, a whistling kettle.' (ibid.)

 What is important is to ask to what kind of a Œcontinuum¹ she is referring.
It appears that she just means that there is a gradation of meaning in the
words themselves so that we could set them out in some kind of ascending
order from stability to changeableness. But what cannot be left out here is
the actual continuum, the changeable real, Œmatter¹, the Œhyle¹ of the
Greeks, Heraclitus¹s flow of becoming ‹ whatever you like to call it ‹ upon
which people are hopefully endeavouring, if they are not lying, to get a
mutual fix with their statements to each other. As the word Œupdating¹ makes
clear, this is a serious engagement with the contingencies of time.  What we
apply these functional devices we call Œparts of speech¹ to is a matter of
human choice.  The word Œmatter¹ itself gives away the fact that we are
trying to divide up the continuum of the real together so that our purposes
will keep in harmony both with the real and with each other across persons.
So what we apply them to must reflect our immediate and long-term
preferences, those that our bodies and the society our bodies try to
maintain out of the real in the hope of success, and not necessarily
anything given in its separateness in the real. Consider these words of
Ernest Fenellosa as he is reflecting on Chinese poetry (The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry, London:  Stanley Nott, 1936: 511):

 
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature.  Things are only
the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections
cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion,
be possible in nature.  The eye sees noun and verb as one:  things in
motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent
them.'


Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

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Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/
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