Johanna,
This is a very rich and interesting post, and it leads me to ask
whether we should follow this direction out in order to make our
grammar much more interesting and useful than the old approaches. Let's
face it, the old "person, place, and thing" definition is both BORING
and LIMITED, and it does not translate well to actual practice. I have
seen "exercises" that seem like nothing more than make-work activities,
picking nouns out from a graph with scrambled up letters, and so on. I
don't think replacing limited notional definitions with "a noun is a
word you can put "the" in front of" is very helpful, even in
combination. We can, of course, put "the" in front of "flash" and
"fight", your two noun/verb examples. We can house the paint and paint
the house. We can murder the lecture and lecture about the murder. We
can fence our troubles and trouble our fences. I can debate the battle
and battle the debate. If the next generation needs to be protected
from this sort of confusion, then we are all in trouble. >
For someone politically conservative, perhaps it would help to point
out that a word like "democracy" is only meaningful within the "frame"
of government and politics (and social organization.) It may take
considerable time to help students "differentiate" this term (concept)
from other possibilities. It is not simply a thing in a world of
things, but a rich and complex concept, vital to our communal
experience and interests as a people. If students are studying these
rich and challenging questions in history and social science, but come
to English class and learn that nouns are things like "button" or
"toad", it's no wonder people believe language study is unimportant.
One reason why people have trouble adjusting to texts in a highly
technical register (we seem to lag much of the world these days in
getting students prepared) is the high level of nominalization in those
texts. Writing is not simply speech put into a constrained (correct)
form, but a way of accomplishing tasks that don't and can't happen
without writing as a medium for interaction and thought. Most of the
evidence seems to be that technical texts make very specialized kinds
of demands on language. To the extent that we can make those explicit,
we can perhaps do a better job of understanding why so many people
have trouble adjusting.
When I am able to say things to my grammar class like "restrictive
postnominal modifiers don't create an additional intonation group", I
sometimes stop long enough to discuss how those kinds of shared
understandings are built into a shared language. We can create
enormously complex structures in order to bring a complex understanding
into focus--in a technical community, this is usually a shared
understanding. So I can say "the additional intonation group created by
a nonrestrictive postnominal modifier..." and simply use that as the
subject of the sentence. As you say well, we do so (nominalize) in
order to carry forward the work of the discourse. One reason our
students' writing does not work well is that it often fails to build
this sort of understanding, but simply says a number of independent
things about a topic.
I don't know if the rest of the list is willing or able to try to
create a scope and sequence that replaces the old simplicities with a
view of language that's more challenging, but more interesting and true
and useful, but to me, it's the only way to go. We have the old
handbooks if someone wants to continue to use them or to dust them off.
I don't think it helps the project for people to claim that there is
nothing new to say or do about grammar when the project itself is, and
has always been, an attempt to create something new.
To me, the prime question is whether ATEG as a group wants to move
forward along those lines. If all we want to do is endorse existing
grammars, we can do so with a simple statement.
Craig
Supposedly, my list access has been restored. Another test ...
>
> Let's get crazy ...
>
> Phil defines a noun as an entity; but what is an entity? Cognitive
> Grammar defines a noun as "a bounded region in some domain". By this is
> meant something which is "marked off" from other things -- that is,
> differentiated from other things. Also, a noun does not track the
> evolution of some situation through time, which is what verbs do (hence
> the frequent term "process" for verb).
>
> This is, of course, a very vague definition, as it has to be if it is
> to cover all nouns' meanings. There is also more to the Cog. Gr.
> definition, defining prototypical nouns, but I won't go into that
> unless someone asks me.
>
> We also need to consider WHY languages have nouns. And why do we make
> some verbs into nouns, like "flash" and "fight"? Why do we create
> gerunds and noun clauses? Some linguists believe that part-of-speech
> categories emerge out of discourse needs. We need nouns because we want
> to talk ABOUT things. We need nouns (and other nominals) as "hooks" to
> hang predicates on. We need nouns in order to direct our listener's or
> reader's conscious attention to something we want to talk about (in
> other words, to refer). We need nouns in order to have topics to which
> we can add ever more information in a text.
>
> As someone else pointed out, a noun names a category, not a single,
> actual thing. A conceptual category, at that. This is evidenced in
> English by the fact that we usually cannot use a noun (especially a
> count noun) alone to talk about something. I can't say "cat is sick". I
> have to point my listener to which cat I mean -- "My mother's tabby cat
> is sick." Even for generic or category reference, we have to use either
> "a" or a plural: "A cat is a selfish animal." "Cats are millstones." (A
> famous linguist had a cat named Millstone; my favorite cat name --
> though I do love cats!) Mass nouns can be used alone in the generic
> sense because they already name an unindividuated type: "Sand is
> gritty." "Grammar is hard." Not all languages work this way, of course.
>
> In teaching nouns, I believe children as young as six can use the
> "the", "a", and "my" tests. Since young children's literature and lives
> have a lot to do with concrete things that are prototypically named by
> nouns, I have no trouble with starting out with a combination of the
> functional "the" test and a notional definition; but the notional
> definition has to be extended fairly rapidly to include abstract
> things. Again, you start with stuff that kids are familiar: a task, an
> idea, a joke, a problem.
>
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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>
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