John,
    When I was looking back at the history of structural grammar, I found
that "person, place, or thing" was routinely used as an example of why
we should try to limit grammar to formal observations as much as
possible. Along with "Sentence as complete thought" it became the
focus of attempts to belittle the older ways. C.C. Fries (who wrote a
fine book on structural grammar) went so far as to recommend that we
dispense with terms like noun and verb altogether, using word class 1,
word class 2 and so on as replacements. Instead of "person, place, or
thing" you can say that a word modified by a determiner and/or a word
that can be made plural and so on is a noun. In other words, we
subject it to formal tests. On the surface at least, this may seem to
be a more accurate description, but it may also pull us radically away
from real discourse and real meaning. It's one thing to say that the
cognitive dimension of nounness or the pragmatic reasons for
construing something as a noun are hard to pin down, another thing to
say that they are not there and ripe for exploration.
   I don't know Schmid's book. I'll be trying to hunt it down. Thanks for
the heads-up on it.

Craig



----- 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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