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
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________________________________________
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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