Gregg,
    I am not sure how John would answer this. A corpus grammar simply
looks at a large body (corpus) of texts and examines various patterns.
In that sense, it is decidedly empirical. Once that's done, though,
you need to be able to explain the patterns. Biber et. al., who have
done the Longman corpus grammar, say it becomes apparent fairly
quickly that what we have is a lexico-grammar, that there is no strict
boundary between our words and our grammar.
    I have done a sort of mild corpus look at nouns with students. I
simply ask every student to pick a dictionary page at random and pick
out the words that the dictionary lists as nouns. (With a handful of
paperback dictionaries, you can do it in a classroom. I usually do it
as homework.) Then, from the full list, I ask them to put the words
into categories that make sense to them. What do "cat" and
"catastrophe" have in common? It's fun, and I think students find it
useful.
    In another, more formal exercise, I ask students to find a word that
is classified as at least two parts of speech and research its
history, using the OED. I ask a number of questions. It becomes
obvious fairly quickly that words move readily from one category to
another.
     >
Craig

 John & Craig,
> 	I have not been tracking this entire conversation, but it seems I
> have dipped into it at the right point.  I am interested in how
> people have empirically tested the presence of abstractions as a
> phenomena in our world.  Could you say more?
> 	I am glad to see this conversation is going somewhere exciting,
> 	Gregg
>
>
> On Dec 13, 2010, at 8:38 AM, John Chorazy wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Craig Hancock
>> "I agree that "person, place, or thing" is harmfully simplistic. Do
>> you
>> simply ignore semantic definition or do you work on a more
>> nuanced one? If we grant something the status of "thing" is there a
>> cognitive dimension to that?"
>>
>> Being somewhat elusive, abstract nouns have never been very popular
>> as objects of linguistic research. English Abstract Nouns as
>> Conceptual Shells fills this long-standing gap in English and general
>> linguistics. Based on a systematic analysis of a very large corpus,
>> it introduces a conceptual and terminological framework for the
>> linguistic description of abstract nouns [...] Semantic, pragmatic,
>> rhetorical, textual and cognitive functions of abstract nouns are
>> discussed, always with reference to the empirical observation and
>> statistical analysis of the corpus data. In this way, a link
>> between the corpus method and functional and cognitive theories of
>> language is
>> established. Caglayan annotated bibliography on Schmid, H.J
>> "English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells" (2000).
>>
>> Craig - my students are pretty used to defining a noun as not a
>> name of something, but a sign or symbol of the thing itself.
>> "Craig" is a name and label used as an identifier, but Craig the
>> person is the noun. So I suppose that "proper" nouns are classified
>> as those names of the people they label. Students also know that
>> "love," albeit an abstraction, is identifiable as a noun too...
>> they recognize its empirically tested presence as a phenomena in
>> our world (your cognitive dimension mentioned above). I'm surprised
>> that the definitions of nouns mentioned so far haven't included
>> this discussion, but based on Schmid I guess this is an elusive
>> concept for some reason?
>>
>> Hope you are all doing well.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> John Chorazy
>> English III Academy, Honors, and Academic
>> Pequannock Township High School
>>
>> Nulla dies sine linea.
>>
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>>
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