But, as has been often pointed out on this list, our 8 parts of speech have at least in part been imposed on English by an early insistance on using Latin grammars as a model; there's a great discussion of this history in our own Brock Haussamen's wonderful book, Revising The Rules: Traditional Grammar and Modern Linguistics. We need to revise our thinking about which/how many parts of speech we actually have in English. Witness, for example, the debate on article, versus adjective, versus determiner. Someone mentioned 9 parts of speech earlier today, and still others find 10 or more. One of our tasks is to settle on what we consider a realistic and teachable description of parts of speech.
Also, your definitions of nouns and verbs suggest Martha Kolln's form words idea -- that is that we recognize nouns and verbs by their forms (plural ending, et al). The form/function concept is quite teachable to adolescents (and perhaps even younger kids, but I can't really speak to that) and useful for later discussions of sentence grammar.
There's clearly room here for opening up our definitions to reflect what we have learned from linguists and still keeping what is useful from tradition.
Paul D.
P. S. I would also vote in favor of using Johanna's list of terminology as a starting point for ther terminology committee.
----- Original Message ----
From: Phil Bralich <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 7:03:46 PM
Subject: Re: Grammar Terms Definitions
>The modernish notion that parts of speech are "givens" rather than a dynamic product of categorization is partly an artifact of a market-driven consensus (maybe due to the popularity, and hence influence, of Reed and Kellogg's texts in the early twentieth century) and partly because of what always happens when you try to introduce complex material to beginning learners: you leave out the messy bits.
>
This actually is not accurate. The parts of speech are better seen as discoveries rather than creations. The parts of speech existed long before there were grammarians. As long as plurals went on nouns and tenses went on verbs there have been the parts of speec. The grammarians didn't force nounness and verbness and so on on to language, they merely found those notions there.
Phil Bralich
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