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;

 

That's only partly true.  The reason they used them in the first place was because there was a "good enough" fit to get started.  Certainly it would be odd to think that any but the most obscure of the 500+ languages of the world did not have nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. 

 

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. 

 

It would probably be best to take an accepted set like that of Quirk and Greenbaum.  Anything else will seem like hubris.  Those guys weren't working in a vacuum and none of what is likely to be mentioned here was unknown to them.  This is old ground without even a hint of a recent discovery to be brought to bear on it. 

 

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.

 

Those weren't meant to be taken as definitions actually.  I cited them that way merely to indicate that nounness, verbness and so on have an identifiable dynamic that is discovered by linguists not created by them.  I often have students who think grammar is something both forced on them and on the language when they should see it as shortcuts to understanding and effectiveness in the language arts.  The fact that the Latin system was popular does not make this any less true.  Even IF it was applied to liberally. 

 

Phil Bralich

 

----- 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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