> Bruce,

Re your mention of Chinese, this quotation from Ernest Fenellosa ('The
Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry' ed. Ezra Pound, San
Francisco: City Lights, 1969) might interest you:

'A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature.  Things are only
the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections
cut through actions, snapshots.  Neither can a pure verb, an abstract
motion, be possible in nature.  The eye sees noun and verb as one:  things
in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to
represent them.'  [See p. 511 in 'Imagining Language:  an Anthology', Jed
Rasula and Steve McCaffery (eds.), Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1998]

Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
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England

Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
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Phil,
>  
> I don't think this is getting any place.  Let's use noun phrases.
> Fido --> a dog --> dogs --> animal --> etc.
> You have to go to the specific to the class at some point.  Generally we use a
> proper noun to refer to one specific individual.  If we use it to refer to a
> class, it is unusual: "There are two Fidos on our block." etc. etc.  The
> Chinese
> do not distinguish between the singular and the plulal.  Their language would
> give them a quite different way to talk about these (untranslatable) concepts.
> That's my only point.
>  
> Bruce
> 
>>>> "Phil Bralich" <[log in to unmask]> 08/24/06 4:58 PM >>>
> 
> What you have below is fine except I am a little unsure of the use of the
> dog's
> name.  That would imply a personality and relationship and a life which
> perhaps
> belongs to the right of dog or on a second set of arrows which refers more to
> sentiment than to existence.  Material being should of course be followed by
> entity and then by noun.
>  
> However in your last sentence I see no reason to conclude that I would impute
> nounness to anything but an entity.
> 
> Phil Bralich
>  
> Fido --> dog --> animal --> life form --> material being --> etc.
>  
> It all depends on where you want to go with it.  The reference is to the same
> instance of a material object, whether its name is "Fido" or there is some
> other
> noun or noun phrase or even noun clause used to do the referring.  You would
> thereby be saying that nounness belongs to many things that are not nouns.
> This
> is what we ought to avoid.  A noun is only part of a noun clause or noun
> phrase.
>  
> 
> Bruce
> 
>>>> "Phil Bralich" <[log in to unmask]> 08/24/06 1:47 PM >>>
> 
> I didn't say these ideas were easy or obvious.  That is why they merit long
> discussions by the world's greatest philosophers; however, we have this rather
> limited world of meanings ascribed to words that are representative of real
> world experience.  So rather than talking of the whole of truth and the whole
> of
> the human experience of truth, we can limit ourselves to an example and the
> way
> it is represented.  Nounness is of course a quality of the word "dog".
> Nounness
> is also a quality of the animal itself as much as four-leggedness and having
> hair.  It is easier to see in broader generalizations.  The word "entity" in
> particular works best.  Noun is certainly a quality of the word "dog" but it
> is
> just as certainly a quality of the existent animal; i.e.,  nouness or
> entity-hood.  
>  
> Try to take this journey from specific to general and see if you might agree
>  
> fur, hair, teeth, claws--> canine, animal, living being, a species -->
> something animate, entity, item in the mind of god, noun,
>  
> Phil Bralich
> 
> 
> 
>  
>  
> Your statement is problematic: "I believe that noun is a quality of the animal
> itself."  How can that be?  Noun must be a quality of the word "animal" or
> "dog", etc., not of the animal being designated with it.  What is material to
> the discussion?  We may use language to model anything as an noun.  You have
> simply shifted the work of "noun" to that of "entity".  That hardly helps
> understanding, nor does it jibe with the basic principle of linguistics, which
> takes language as the object of study, not animals.  My point is that
> languages
> do not always model the world in the same way.  For example, a feminine noun
> does not always refer to a female object, etc.  Classification in animals
> cannot
> be taken to correspond to the classification in the designations of those
> animals.  Biologists have to develop their own language to do that, and that
> not
> always successfully.
>  
> Bruce
> 
>>>> "Phil Bralich" <[log in to unmask]> 08/24/06 11:32 AM >>>
> 
> Really immaterial to the discussion.  "Table" "Chair" "heat" "ghost"
> "enthusiasm" "Napolean" "The Present King of France" are all entities.  Some
> may
> be non-existent, but they are all entities.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Despain
> Sent: Aug 24, 2006 10:00 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Defining Traditional Grammar
> 
> Phil,
>  
> Not to deep-six the discussion, but there is a fatal flaw in your idea of
> nounness.  We can see in the progress of science how language has misled
> investigators in many places.  One example is "heat" as a noun.  For many
> years
> investigators tried to find the element that was flowing from one object to
> another.  It could never be found.  It does not exist.  (Now science speaks of
> "entropy".)  People had reified the concept.  Let's not do this to our
> students,
> if we can avoid it.
>  
> Bruce
> 
>>>> "Phil Bralich" <[log in to unmask]> 08/24/06 9:40 AM >>>
> 
> This is a problem that has been discussed by Plato, Aristotle, Paramenides,
> Spinoza, Hegel and Kant to name just a few.   It is discussed under a vareity
> of
> names so it may difficult to recognize at first, for Hegel the Begriff, for
> Plato the Logos, and for most English speaking philopshers the Concept or the
> Idea of Ideas.  In this the issue of the degree to which words and language
> interact with the actual objects that they refer to.  That is too say, this is
> an issue of some complexity.  However, for our purposes the issue is more
> rooted
> in the specifics of grammar teaching than in the wider world of philosophy but
> we beg these issues at this point.  The word "dog" is an element of language
> and
> exists in the head as part of a system of signs.  However, the meaning of dog
> (even its nounness) is dependent on the actually occuring animal  for learning
> and for periodic review.  For example, we must know ! ! ! that a dog has hair,
> claws, four legs, and so forth.  The word is dependent on this knowledge of
> the
> real world.  Also and more generally but no less true, it is a mammal, a
> living
> being, an entity, and finally a noun.  This quality can no more be completely
> severed from the dog as the sequence of three sounds d - o - g can be
> completely
> severed from the existing animal.  You, like Paramenides, separate the word
> the
> thing a bit too much.  I am much more with Plato, Kant, and Hegel in believing
> the relation between the word dog and the concept dog are quite dependent.
> And
> thereby I believe that noun is a quality of the animal itself -- more general
> than entity or mammal but still a quality of the animal itself.
> 
> Phil Bralich
> 
>> 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! m! ! inds 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, d! irect ob! ! ject, 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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