> William,

Of course one can understand why one would want to simplify matters for
foreign students, and home ones too:  you get immediate results that way.
It is not as if you were setting up bad habits that would have to removed
with difficulty later (as in learning to play an instrument).  However,
there is a sense in which too strong a reliance on words belonging to given
word-classes goes against the underlying bent of language.

In spite of Saussure, words did not begin with some arbitrary agreement.
The code character that gets built up over time, as well as the tropological
drift that goes on all the time, erases the origins of words, but the
initial seed must have been some kind of trope.  The imagination is involved
at the start;   there is always a transformation -- in the Statement itself
as well as the Word.  After all, one speaks in order to update someone else,
to transform their conceptualizing of the world.

The world doesn't come neatly parcelled into given entities, already
awaiting labels.  We may like to say, because it is cosy and reassuring,
that we have useful labels for 'persons, places and things', but none of
those have some perfect ontological singularity.  We all have different
takes on some fuzzy region of the real space-time continuum that we together
call an 'entity', so it is an act of imagination to presume that some
logically singular bit of that region pre-dates our mutual acts of sorting.

'Nouniness' thus doesn't have any safe grounding in the real:  it is rather
based on our needful taking for granted that we have sorted some- 'thing'
out of the real that will satisfy our common purposes.  Nietzsche said
'Thingness is created by us' -- he should have added 'by two or more of us
acting together.'   It is important to notice that, if two persons engaged
in speech didn't work on this assumption of singularity, they wouldn't be
able to get even a rough degree of co-ordination on the fuzzy region
concerned -- it helps them to get their differing takes aligned together
sufficiently for the transformation to go through, but it remains a 'taking
for granted' all the same.

Recall what 'taking for granted' means:  "It was so foggy I took him for his
brother" -- that is, one accepts something not certain as if it is -- which
implies that your 'granting' only goes so far.  So for an informative
statement to be made, speaker and hearer have initially to  be making a
different selection from the continuum -- that is, there wasn't 'one' entity
that was the same for both of them in the first place!  There wouldn't be
any point on speaking, -- would there? -- if both were making the same
selection.  Yet both have to behave as if a singular, identical entity was
indeed before them -- which is an act of faith in the other in a situation
where one has no guarantee that the other's 'taking for granted' is the same
as one's own, no certainty that the presumed 'common purposes' are going to
be as 'common' as hoped, or that the two takes on the real match as regards
all the criteria considered vital by each.  If they turn out not to be, then
the degree of faith becomes critical, since sacrifice might be demanded from
either or both -- a comic or tragic outcome.

So the idea of the form 'noun' is just part of the imaginative game.  Think
of the 'noun-form' as a needful counter that doesn't really correspond to a
singular entity though we have to use it as if it did.  It is no surprise
then that words slip and slide about.

Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/
Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256






Edmond:
> 
> A good many words, though by no means all, seem to have "default
> settings" in English. As you point out, this may merely be a case of the
> analyst creating what amounts to a stereotype based on observations of
> frequency -- but then, sometimes frequency *does* crucially determine
> the way people deal with things. If I use the word "invitation," instead
> of the word "invite," speakers will likely have a higher expectation
> that the word's showing up in a noun slot, even though modern speakers
> can (and do) use "invite" as a noun sometimes and even though a host of
> other structural cues will either confirm or contradict that
> expectation. 
> 
> I'm trying to approach this in terms of expectations because I'd like to
> avoid attributing some essential quality of "nouniness" to nouns, which
> they then retain no matter how you use them. That's a classic Platonist
> approach; it underlies much of traditional grammar, and it shows up in a
> kind of biological costume in many modern theories, but I'm not sure how
> to demonstrate the existence of an essential quality in any non-circular
> way. On the other hand, I can think of ways to test for speakers'
> expectations, and I do think frequency is relevant to them. I also do
> not want to give the impression that I think every word should be
> assigned strictly to a single lexical category; I just think that many
> *can* be.
> 
> Regardless of how we approach this theoretically, there is also a
> pedagogical dimension, and it's of particular relevance to ESL students.
> Even if frequency *isn't* correlated with some kind of
> category-assignment, it does serve as a good basis for working with
> students who are trying to sound more like native English-speakers, or
> even native-English-speakers who are trying to sound more like users of
> formal written English. While I can say something like, "I've been
> invitationed half to death" in the right context and pull it off, ESL
> students are likely to be perceived as having trouble with the language
> when they do something similar. If this were forty years ago, I could
> say the same thing about native speakers using "impact" in verb slots.
> Even when we move from "do this or you're making an error" to "do this
> if you want to be perceived as a member of this particular speech
> community," it's handy to have content to fill in for the "do this"
> part.
> 
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmond Wright
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 5:57 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Form and function
> 
>

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