John,
   I want to start by offering an apology. It was not right for me to
respond critically to your post in another post. "Tricks" does seem a
loaded term. You have every right to feel angry and offended. It was
careless of me and wrong. And I certainly know your approaches to
grammar enough to understand that this is not an end point for you.
   Here's what I worry about. First of all, many nouns can't be made
plural and can't be preceded by "the". So you need naturally to work
through those exceptions.
   In a sentence like "I love justice," which is the noun? You can make
love plural and precede it with "the", but you can't do that with
justice.
   Or how about "I did escape, but my escape was short-lived." Is escape a
noun in both instances? It passes the noun test, as do so many other
words that are both nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
   Why can  I say "the village of Valatie" but not "the
Valatie?"
   If I come home and tel my family "I saw the cow on my way home," they
are likely to think I have lost my bearings. They will think they are
supposed to know which cow I am talking about. does that mean "cow" is
not a noun in that instance?
   If we retain the sentence context for these words, the problems don't
go away. "I admire her voice." I can't add "the" to this: "I admire her
the voice." Does that mean voice is not a noun? No, it means the
determiner slot is already taken up; but what is that slot? What
function does "the" perform? There's a whole system of modification
that allows us to ground an otherwise vague common noun within a
discourse context. If we learn how to identify a noun through purely
formal grounds (which I think can only happen if you carefully control
the examples), we miss the  opportunity to look closely at a very rich
and interesting meaning system.
   I agree that memorizing a definition of "person, place, and thing" is
not a substitute for a real exploration of language, and it will only
get you so far along the path. But I think there is a cognitive basis
for nounhood, and person, place, or thing isn't a bad place to start.
It's not complete, but it's not trivial. You can say persons, places,
and things tend to be named by nouns, but you can't say that nouns are
persons, places, and things. It's a smaller, but very central category.
On a very basic level, our first introduction to noun is a sort of
"bounded entity", and that gets extended out metaphorically in
different ways in different cultures.
   One point I don't hear people saying is that pretty much anything can
be nominalized, including whole clauses. We have discourse needs that
push that process.
    I don't want to conflate your approaches with the formal approaches I
am trying to challenge. I apologize again. You're right; I don't have
the most gracious way of saying things. I think if our primary concern
is how to classify words and sentences, and if we spend all our time
looking at the formal evidence for classification, we will end up with
an approach to grammar that does not translate over to reading and
writing.
    I am  in the uncomfortable position of trying to say that we should
step back and wonder if our approaches are at all useful. And since so
many people are vested in those approaches (hey, I'm disagreeing with
myself), it's hard to do it tactfully.
   In the U.S., we are heirs to a tradition of formal grammar that runs
against the grain of our traditional school grammar. I don't think
either camp can win the battle. And whole language approaches to
reading and writing (which proponents believe can proceed without
direct attention to language except for "literary elements") are
enabled by theoretical view that the grammar of the language is merely
formal and innate.
    Again, though, I apologize. I have gained a great deal from talks with
you over the years and had no right to respond so carelessly.

Craig

 Craig,
>
> Although you didn't respond to this post within this thread, you certainly
> responded to it in the thread on transitive vs. intransitive.  And I
> quote:
>
> "Categorizing can be an awfully empty practice. Learning the tricks for
> identifying a noun may be
> useful for a test asking you to use the tricks to identify a noun, but it
> takes the very lively and rich subject of language and turns it into a
> tedious formal game."
>
> Once again you have determined that I am resorting to empty trickery with
> my
> approach--this time concerning how to teach elementary students how to
> identify nouns.  You are missing major benefits that go well beyond the
> "tricks":  benefits such as beginning to develop a curiosity about one's
> language, trust in one's language intuitions, and (later on) the ability
> to
> query one's language competency in order to resolve issues in writing.
> Learning to identify nouns makes a very small contribution to all of the
> above, I grant you, but I have found it to be an excellent beginning
> point.
> And the "tricks" work.
>
> You then state the following:
>
> "  Person, place, and thing may not be a full definition, but it is not
> trivial."
>
> First of all, I don't understand why this definition isn't an example of
> "categorizing," but one that you, for some reason, support.  Secondly, I
> think this definition is trivial, indeed.  My freshman comp students can
> recite this definition in unison, but 75+% of them cannot identify a noun
> when asked to do so.  I do not think that the skill of identifying a noun
> is
> an important one at all, but it seems to me that we should be getting a
> much
> better return for our investment than that.  (It takes 3-5 minutes to
> teach
> students the "tricks"; after that, they are all noun-identifying
> geniuses.)
>
> Just when I think that you and I are beginning to see eye to eye on
> things,
> you fire another shot to let me know that such is not the case.  And then
> you refer to your take on things as being "rather lonely."
>
> John
>
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 5:29 AM, John Crow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Tabetha,
>>
>> I agree with John Alexander in that the way to teach nouns is to use a
>> functional or operational approach.  To me, when teaching grammar, the
>> best
>> approach is to build from what students already know, and to do so in a
>> manner that lets them discover the concept.  Even 2nd graders would be
>> able
>> to handle something like the following:
>>
>> Bring two each of the following to class:  apple, grape, banana.  Show
>> the
>> students one apple and ask them what it is.  Then show them both apples
>> and
>> ask them again.  Repeat with each fruit.  Then ask them to tell you what
>> letter (or sound) they added when you changed from one to two.  Now
>> intro
>> the word "noun," telling them that "apple," "grape," and "banana" are
>> all
>> nouns.  Ask them what letter you can add to a noun if you need to.  They
>> will say "s."  Then ask them what they have discovered about nouns.
>> They
>> will tell you that you can add "s" to it.  Ask them what it means when
>> you
>> add "s" and they will tell you.  Then look at "foot."  They will know,
>> of
>> course, that you cannot have "foots."  I'll skip the details and skip to
>> the
>> main point:  What you are trying to do is get them to "discover" that
>> nouns
>> can normally be made plural, usually by adding "s".  Once they grasp
>> that
>> concept, they become noun-identifying geniuses.  ("Is 'idea' a noun?
>> Sure--one idea, two ideas.")  I think with 2nd graders I would stop
>> there,
>> but you have to be prepared to deal with words like "chalk"--frames are
>> OK
>> (the ___________), but proper nouns often do not fit.  I prefer pronoun
>> substitution as a good test for nouns.  (You can't say "the Texas" but
>> Texas
>> is an "it.")
>>
>> Tying what you are trying to teach to what they already know (albeit
>> subconsciously) is much more effective than teaching a definition that
>> they
>> memorize, but that does not connect.
>>
>> (If you use this with your pre-service class, for practice, ask them to
>> come up with an operational definition of a verb.)
>>
>> I agree with Craig:  we have to fundamentally change the way teachers
>> THINK
>> about grammar if we want our teaching to stick and to transfer to
>> real-language situations.
>>
>> John
>>
>
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