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
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________________________________________
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


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