Yes but that also holds for canine. There is no pure canine only breeds that represent canine; i.e, an animal that is representative of all breeds of dog. Any time you get above the ontogenetic you will no longer find pure examples.
The Chinese language unlike western languages does not emphasize determinate space that is why you do not see articles and even plural. When every noun is a non-count noun and you have to use counters rather than plural you see a wish to remain in an undetermined reality. Not wanting to be too definite. This works well for what it is, and the attitude is understandable but I don't ever recall having a problem identifying parts of speech in Chinese in spite of these interesting though rather poetic beliefs.
I heard a Tibetan guy one time tell me that the Chinese are incapable of doing grammar. That is, that the culture prefers a poetic to a logical world.
Phil Bralich
>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
>Cambridge
>CB4 1DU
>England
>
>Email: [log in to unmask]
>Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
>Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>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
>>>
>>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
>> at:
>>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>>
>>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the
>> intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and
>> privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use,
>> disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the
>> intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email
>> and destroy all copies of the original message.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the
>> intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and
>> privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use,
>> disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the
>> intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email
>> and destroy all copies of the original message.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/To join or leave this LISTSERV list,
>> please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the
>> intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and
>> privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use,
>> disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the
>> intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email
>> and destroy all copies of the original message.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/To join or leave this LISTSERV list,
>> please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the
>> list"
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the
>> intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and
>> privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use,
>> disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the
>> intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email
>> and destroy all copies of the original message.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>and select "Join or leave the list"
>
>Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
