I'd like Phil to define "entity". "Something that exists" is clearly not the definition, because "the present King of France" does not exist. The _concept_ "the present King of France" can exist in one's imagination, of one builds a fictional world in which France has a king. But that king is still just a concept, not a person. A concept is certainly an entity, but a person and a concept are very different kinds of entities. If there were no humans, would dogs still be nouns? How do you define "noun"? If a tree falls in the forest, and there are no ears around, does it make a sound? Certainly, its movement disturbs air molecules in a way that would register as sound on one kind of ear or another. So does it depend on how we define "sound"? To me, and I'm betting to a lot of other language scholars, "noun" is a linguistic term. It refers to a word class or "species" (I like that analogy) in human language. As I said in my last post, these classifications exist in the human mind, and only there. If what you mean to say is that dogs have properties that make them likely to be named by nouns by human beings, then that makes sense. But the word "noun" (at least as it is conventionally used) has no meaning outside of human heads. In Arabic, there is no difference between the word for "arm" and the word for "hand". I think the same is true for foot/leg, though there may be a word for the sole of the foot; I don't recall. If there is some inherent relationship between a word and what it names in the world, is there something wrong with Arabic, or with English? What makes "time" a noun? Our perception of time is based in the brain, and it is flexible, as anyone who has been in an auto accident knows (and recent research is tracking down the neurological mechanism that makes it flexible). People thought of time very differently before Einstein, and now people are questioning Einstein's idea of time. What makes "lightning" a noun? If there is anything event-like, it is lightning. If nouns are entities and verbs are not, why can a word be both a noun and a verb? Our only access to the world is through our brains. Our brains are limited in what they perceive, and they are wired to see and divide up the world in particular ways different from the brains of worms or bees (if they have things we could call a brain) or frogs or kittens or hawks or dolphins. It's possible that we are not yet aware of everything our brain can perceive (as brain studies continually reveal sensibilities we weren't aware of before), but that doesn't change the fact that our brains are the "processors" of everything we experience. If there are some kind of magical links between a word and a dog, we haven't discovered them yet. In any case, that link would have to recognize "chien", "Hund", "kalb", "kalba", and thousands of other languages' words for dog. As to bad grammar teaching practices, tell me what purpose it serves to have 2nd-graders who are native speakers of standard English underline the correct verb form in this sentence on a worksheet: "Susie's parents (are/is) very friendly people." What is it, beyond a reading test? A smart kid this age would have to wonder exactly what the point is of having her do something that requires no work or thought whatsoever (except, again, reading). She will need no knowledge of grammar terms and will not have to consciously apply any rules to choose the correct answer. All she has to do is underline the verb she would say. There are quite a few exercises like this in the language-arts books used in California schools today. I have several right here in my house. 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/