Herb,
   I think American structuralists tried to make grammar more scientific 
by reducing it to formal observations and the "rules" that go with that. 
Other aspects of language get pushed off into semantics and pragmatics. 
There are two problems that come with that. One, which Bolinger pointed 
out, is that looking at grammar as a system of formal rules may in fact 
be a distortion of what we are attempting to observe. The other problem 
is that  grammar divorced from discourse and from meaning seems 
irrelevant to reading and writing. It is the province of experts, not of 
the public.
   A cognitive view of nounhood isn't simple, but it will be rich and 
interesting. The challenge may be trying to find a way to make it 
practical and accessible, to make it, as you have said before, both 
truthful and useful.
   It might be interesting to look at traditional grammar as an approach 
in need of revision. Its prime advantage might be that it tries to 
describe the language and give advice at the same time. The weakness is 
that it doesn't do either particularly well.
  
Craig

STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
> It's perhaps odd for a linguist to defend that notional, prescriptive definition, and I certainly would not teach it.  We all know what's wrong with it, but we tend not to ask what's right with it, and Scott's question about the omission of "idea" from the list points to one thing that is, perhaps unintentionally, right with it.  By focusing on the concrete, the definition comes quite close to defining a prototypical noun, that is, the name of an object that has physical extension and is countable.  Such nouns ("child," "farm," ball") tend to be unanalyzable single morphemes, whereas more difficult nouns to extend the definition to frequently have affixes ("kindness," "electricity"), or more restricted grammatical behavior("rice," "caviar").  By teaching the prototype, as I was taught, it then becomes easier, I think, for the learner to extend the class to words that are less prototypical.  We tend to disparage the definition as notional without considering that it may be prototypical.
>
> I guess my point is that some of these features of school grammar aren't as mindless as we make them out to be.  The same is true of the Latinate rules of grammar from the 18th-20th cc.  Until the 1950s we really didn't have anything like a comprehensive theory of language above the level of phonology.  American Structuralists extended the phonology model (phoneme/allophone) to morphology (morpheme/allomorph), but the more cautious linguists among them, like Dwight Bolinger, recognized that the analogy was not without problems.  What especially 18th and 19th c. grammarians did was apply the grammar of a language they knew a lot about and had a long tradition for, namely, Latin, to a language they found rather more difficult to describe, English.  This extension of a model from the known to the unknown is unexceptionable scientific practice.  What good science then does is test the model and modify it where it doesn't make accurate predictions (eight parts of speech).  But grammar teachers haven't tended to treat school grammar as a set of hypotheses but rather as a set of truths.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN  47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: July 15, 2008 8:47 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Nouns; ATEG Digest - 13 Jul 2008 to 14 Jul 2008 (#2008-160)
>
> "person, place, or thing"?
>
> Back in grammar school (1940's), I learned that a noun was the name of a
> person, place, thing, or idea and always taught it that way.  Is that
> verbiage just a Southern concept or what happened to 'idea' in the
> definition?
> Scott
>
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