>I'd like Phil to define "entity". "Something that exists" is clearly 
>not the definition, because "the present King of France" does not 
>exist. The _concept_ "the present King of France" can exist in one's 
>imagination, of one builds a fictional world in which France has a 
>king. But that king is still just a concept, not a person. A concept is 
>certainly an entity, but a person and a concept are very different 
>kinds of entities.


A ghost, the present king of France, enthusiasm, patriotism all these are things that exist and are entities.  Time is also an entity as in "the time I spent at the baseball game last week.'  

>If there were no humans, would dogs still be nouns? 

The problem here is that only humans have language so dogs would not only not be nouns they would also not be dogs.  There is an interaction to be considerd more than a choice of one side or the others.  

>How do you define 
>"noun"? 

There two things that you can say: a) something which is perceived to exist in time and space or b) an entity.  


>To me, and I'm betting to a lot of other language scholars, "noun" is a 
>linguistic term. It refers to a word class or "species" (I like that 
>analogy) in human language. As I said in my last post, these 
>classifications exist in the human mind, and only there.


This unquestionably is commonly held belief but your argument displaces not only nounness as existent in the thing itself but also displaces speciesness, genusness, and so forth, anything more abstract than a five senses presentation only exists in the mind.  Siding more with Hegel than Paramenides and Plato, and perhaps even behaviorism and cognitive psychology, it is better to say that the part of speech classifications exist in the same realm as all abstractions: as discoverable qualities within the observed world ergo as nounness in the dog.  



 If nouns are entities and verbs are not, why can a word be 
>both a noun and a verb?

There is absolutely nothing about words or about categories that would allow one to conclude that one word cannot be used as different parts of speech.   When I say "let's try" or when I say "give it a try", the fact that in one case try is a verb in another it is a noun is nothing other than a fact about language that needs to be noted.  The location of an action, process or state in time and space as an entity is just something you can do.  You can use a noun verbally and verb nominally in one case nounness is inherent in it and in the other it lost.  Words are more like plants which can be seen as seed, bud, or flower or a shirt that faded from blue to white.  You do not need to say that a shirt needs to remain blue once it is blue.  You also are not precluded from using it as a rag to wash your car.  



>If there are some kind of magical links between a word and a dog, we 
>haven't discovered them yet. In any case, that link would have to 
>recognize "chien", "Hund", "kalb", "kalba", and thousands of other 
>languages' words for dog.

This is a false problem canine 

>
>As to bad grammar teaching practices, tell me what purpose it serves to 
>have 2nd-graders who are native speakers of standard English underline 
>the correct verb form in this sentence on a worksheet: "Susie's parents 
>(are/is) very friendly people." What is it, beyond a reading test? A 
>smart kid this age would have to wonder exactly what the point is of 
>having her do something that requires no work or thought whatsoever 
>(except, again, reading). She will need no knowledge of grammar terms 
>and will not have to consciously apply any rules to choose the correct 
>answer. All she has to do is underline the verb she would say.

The main purpose for teaching grammar is to improve your brains analytic ability which has value in every other subject.  The more you can isolate subjects and predicates, clauses and so forth, and the more you can do this quickly and effortlessly the more your rhetoric and logic improve and the better you become at all  your subjects.  We should no more be allowed to use these arguments as grammar as should be allowed use them on algebra.  Millions of students never use algebra once they leave the school system but this training has made them better thinkers.  Also we should no more stop teaching grammar because a bright student finds it easy than we should stop teaching math because a bright student finds it easy.  These arguments are completely irrelevant.  


>There are quite a few exercises like this in the language-arts books 
>used in California schools today. I have several right here in my 
>house.


I honestly cannot believe you will find many people who would see those exercises as problematic.  

Phil Bralich

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