Johanna, Bill, and so on,
I'm working my way through Langacker's views on "grounding", and he
seems to use nominal as anything we can conceive of AND anything we can
comment on. And it seems that nominal is innately tied to discourse.
"person, place, or thing" may be a very incomplete definition, but it
is not a trivial one. I think anyone trying to get a working feel for
"noun" has to include it. The problem, I think, is that people memorize
a definition rather than understanding phenomena. It might be like
learning a definition for "beaver." It doesn't get you very far. It
trivializes the process. And the fact that people can memorize "person,
place, or thing" and not see it as incomplete means it is a retreat
from language, not a way into it.
Does a name have an individual (unique)referent? In a sense, we have
common nouns in order to save ourselves the necessity of naming
everything we encounter. But that brings into play the need to "ground"
a noun within discourse so that we know which "car" or "house" or
"mistake" we are talking about. So much of what tradiitonal grammar
lumps into "modification" is called into play for those purposes. It
seems to me that those sorts of understandings are key to how language
works and operates and so much more interesting than merely formal
classifications. I don't think cognition and discourse can be separated
out very easily. Discourse might be a kind of negotiated cognition, an
interactive mental space.
I think we need to keep saying about language that there is a lot to
know. And that there are rich rewards for being curious about it.
Craig
Bill's definition of noun as the thing you make a comment about would
> be discourse-based, and likely to emerge out of theories of discourse
> rather than Cognitive Grammar. I think this discourse basis is a good
> way to think about nominals in general, leastways in subject
> position. Noun clauses and other nominalizations exist because we
> want to make comments about whole states of affairs, or non-nouns.
> E.g., "that he will show up is unlikely."
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
> Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Dept.
> Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
> San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
> Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
> Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
> Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> URL: cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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