This message  was originally submitted  by [log in to unmask]  to the ATEG  list
 
Burkhard,
     Perhaps part of the problem here is that we are
thinking in terms of different audiences. Could you tell
us what you teach, and to whom? Those of us who
are teaching grammar and writing to American middle,
high school, and Freshman college students appear to
be looking for a simple (not simplistic) way of teaching
students how words function in sentences, i.e., how
words syntactically relate to each other. We hope (and
believe) that if students understand this, they will better
understand how the words in their own writing (and
reading) interrelate. Most of us are not interested in
linguistics, or even grammar per se.
     If I remember correnctly, Bill McCleary gave his
ATEG conference KeyNote address on Toulmin's
logic. He said that logicians do not appreciate Toulmin,
but that Toulmin works for students, and that we need
something in grammar comparable to Toulmin's logic.
(Bill, correct me if I'm wrong). It appears to me that
you (Burkhard) are in the camp with the logicians who
would not appreciate Toulmin, i.e., you are looking at
linguistics as linguistics, rather than at how to present
these ideas to students, many of whom do not know
that "of" is a preposition and "have" is a verb.
 
     By the way, I just finished the semester working
with a fairly intelligent, older student in a grammar
course. She did fairly well, but still has tremendous
problems distinguishing an adjective from a noun. For
example, in the sentence "Moses pleaded a speech
defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Johovah's
edict to Pharaoh," she marked "reluctance" as a
predicate adjective. We have discussed many of the
various ways of identifying nouns and adjectives, but
she still has trouble. I have never seen such a case
before, and am wondering if anyone else has.
Thanks,
Ed V.
 
>>> Jim Dubinsky <[log in to unmask]> 12/13/97
09:42am >>>
[This message  was originally submitted  by
[log in to unmask] to the
ATEG list ]
 
Replying to Edith Wollin and William J. McCleary:
 
 
You're offering an interesting argument, Edith, when
saying that
"sometimes I am a mother, sometimes a teacher,
sometimes an
administrator, sometimes a gardener,...". Now I can
see why you
said that 'who(m) I saw last night' IS a noun if it
functions as
one.
 
Before I answer this argument I'd like to discuss
another case.
If memory serves, Charles Laughton once played
Galilei in
Brecht's play. Would you say that Laughton WAS
Galilei? To me
this doesn't make sense. While Laughton was on the
stage he
didn't change into Galilei, he was still Laughton, he just
played
the role of Galilei. If an actor, who plays umpteen roles
during
his career, actually became the persons he
represents, this would
certainly put a lot of strain on his genes :-) It would be
like
constantly 'beaming' them up, i.e. taking them apart
and then
putting the pieces together again. - One more thing.
Charles
Laughton was not the only one to play Galilei. Ernst
Busch did so
once in Berlin, Ernst Schroeder in Zuerich, I think. If
playing
roles made them into Galileis, too, we would have
found a way to
do away with gene technology, cloning of anyone
could be done by
just making people play roles, I could live forever by
playing
the role of my son, and so could my son by playing the
role of
his son, and so on.
 
Following 'your' logic we would also have to say that
Ernst Busch
became Charles Laughton, and Ernst Schroeder, as
well. So a
second method of cloning would arise. (The
wh-sentence 'who(m) I
saw last night', you argued, became a noun because it
can play
the same role as the noun 'Jack'.)
 
No, it doesn't help our understanding of the world
when we put
who a person IS and what ROLES s/he plays in the
same category.
Even if the odd actor may be turning into the character
he or she
plays (e.g. in a tv-series), it just shows they are not
psychologically healthy people.
 
The person/the object must be distinguished  from the
roles they
play, the functions they perform, the functional slots
they fill.
We should not be trapped by language, i.e.  by the
weird fact
that we can use one word for different referents, e.g.
BE for the
object's existence and for it's role. You PLAY the
mother's role,
the teacher's role, etc. That these are roles is also
shown by
the fact that you use different language when talking
as a mother
to your child, or when talking as a teacher to students,
etc.
Much of the language we use is role-based.
 
And then, of course, we must distinguish a third
category, namely
the category of word classes (sometimes called 'parts
of
speech'). 'Noun' is the name of a word class. Like
'woman' is the
name of a class of female humans. Or 'American
actor' is the
class of male persons born in the US and whose
profession is to
play roles on the stage etc.
 
So instead of using just one category (noun) we need
to use
three: object, class, function - provided we want to
understand
the phenomenon of language (so as to make it easier
to teach it).
 
And, William, if you want to set up a class of those
objects that
can fill the same slot that a word like 'Jack' can fill,
then, of
course, a term like 'nominal' would be much preferable
to 'noun',
which traditionally refers to a group of words only.
Whether we
need such a class is a matter that would have to be
discussed.
For the moment I can't see it would be helpful - on the
contrary,
because not every functional slot that can be filled by a
noun
can also be filled by the same group of language
objects. E.g.
all object slots can have nouns. What other structures,
though,
can go into object slots depends on the individual verb.
 
One last thing, William. Like Charles Laughton played
more than
one role, in the same way language items usually can
fill more
than one function. But they don't usually change into
other
words. 'Horse' is a noun is a noun is a noun, in 'the
horse barn'
it does the same work that an adjective can do, but it
does not
become an adjective. The work the adjective 'green'
and the noun
'horse' can do here is traditionally called 'attribute
function'.
'Fish' is a different matter. 'Fish' is two words, one is a
member of the noun class, the other a member of the
verb class.
If the line is difficult to draw in some cases (in English,
less
so in other languages), then this does not mean there
is no line.
 
Sorry for the long meandering ...
Burkhard
 
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Burkhard Leuschner - Paedagogische Hochschule
Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany
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