Two corrections, from the standpoint of linguistics, to two recent 
posts.

1) From Eduard Hanganu: "how can you [sic] students identify the simple
subject, the simple predicate, and the objects in a sentence if they
do not know the parts of speech?"

Single words do not fill roles such as subject, predicate, direct 
object, and so on. These are clause-level ROLES that are filled by a 
variety of types of structures: subjects can be noun phrases, pronouns, 
clauses, and, some even claim, prepositional phrases*. If a single noun 
occupies the subject slot, that is just a case of the smallest possible 
subject constituent. But if a sentence has a noun-phrase subject, the 
whole phrase is the subject, not the head noun. The subject of "The 
pre-school children in room 5 are going to the park this afternoon" is 
"The pre-school children in room 5", not "children". "Children" is the 
head of the subject phrase. Nominals fill these roles (see below).

Ex.: "Under the bed is all dusty." (R. W. Langacker)

2. Phil Bralich claims all entities or things are nouns.  A noun is a 
class of word; classes of words are elements of language; language is a 
mental phenomenon. Nouns exist only in the minds of human beings. You 
cannot point to something in the world, like a rock, and say it is a 
noun. Word meanings are concepts, not things outside the mind. When we 
are exposed to the world, we make a mental record of our experience; we 
see things like rocks and form a concept of rocks. We learn to 
associate a word ("rock") with the concept.  Then we classify words 
into categories based on certain _perceived_ features of the things and 
on discourse needs. The prototypical entity likely to be named by a 
noun is (a) concrete (b) clearly differentiated from other entities (c) 
time-stable, that is, it does not change its essence or properties very 
fast; (d) it is internally differentiated, that is, it has parts that 
are different from each other; (e) it is countable.

The fewer of these properties an entity is perceived to have, the less 
likely it is to be named by a noun. Also, the fewer of these properties 
it has, the fewer noun inflection "privileges" it will have, such as 
being able to be pluralized.

Perception and cultural conditioning are extremely important. Not all 
languages assign the same phenomena to the noun and verb classes.

In response to Craig and others, I believe it is very helpful to teach 
students how to use inflectional tests like adding plural -s to 
identify a word's class. It's like a basic definition in mathematics -- 
not sexy, but part of the basic equipment. Much more can be said about 
nouns, of course, and should, according to the students' level.

I spoke in another message of the difference between class and 
function. "Nominal" is the function that clauses play when they are 
subjects or direct objects; in fact, "nominal" is the superordinate 
term for structures that play roles like subject, direct object, and so 
on. "Nominal" is a discourse function for referring and for supplying 
something to which we can assign a predicate (say something about).

My own textbook takes a thoroughgoing cognitive/functional approach 
(along with structural descriptions) to English grammar. If all goes 
well, it will be out by summer of '07 or a little later.

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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