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 <[log in to unmask]>
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 i! n 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 sub! ject, 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:
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>
>Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

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