This is a long response to Robert Einarsson's posting. I make no
apologies for its length.

I admit that I am not deeply read in the tradition of grammar that started
with the Greeks. And I have only begun to explore study of language during
the Renaissance, from which today's pedagogical grammars are descended.
Now, the human mind is the human mind; I'm sure that scholars of the
Renaissance were capable of achieving, and did achieve, deep insights
about language. I also know that there were conflicting ideas about how to
analyze language during that time.

What I see as problematic with the Renaissance tradition of grammar, as
much as I know about it, or at least what has come down to us in
pedagogical grammars of today, are two things:

- There was an opposition between descriptivism and prescriptivism in
studies of English during the Renaissance. The prescriptive
attitude was the one that won out, in terms of popularization: from the
first, the grammars most likely to be published were those that extolled
the English "of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about
London within lx. myles, and not much above" (Puttenham, 1589), and
condemned the English of "the common people of every shire" (ibid.)

Call it refinement or revolution, but linguistics in this
century has sided with the descriptivists, and has used elegant
argumentation from both logic and vast amounts of empirical evidence from
thousands of languages across the globe to defend its case.

Prescriptivism was part pure elitist class prejudice, and part a result of
the other problem I see in the ancient traditions of the study of English:
the heavy influence of Latin and Greek grammatical categories, not
appropriate for every language in the world, especially languages as
different from Classical Latin and Classical Greek as is English. English
is simply not the same type of language as these two: case marking has all
but vanished from the language; we have few fusional or 'portmanteau'
morphemes, which were legion in Latin; our verbal morphology is minimalist
compared to Latin, Greek, and many other languages.

Europe was just beginning to emerge from the hegemony of the Roman
Catholic Church, and a tradition according to which writing down
'vernacular' languages such as German and English was sometimes considered
heretical; there was no difference between religion and scholarship; and
any discourse that wanted to be remotely respectable took place in Latin
or Greek. The common folk were peasant chattel whose lives were controlled
entirely by lords and clerics -- witness the many tragically failed
peasant revolutions of the medieval and later periods. The weight of these
centuries of reverence for the Classical languages didn't dissipate
overnight; the touting of Latin or grammar education as a surefire way to
cultivate logical thought, present even today, is part of its residue.
Study of these things _does_ cultivate good critical thinking habits, but
so does training in any science.

In any case, all this is virtually beside the point, because the grammar
of the 17th C is not what's taught in what I am calling 'traditional
grammar'books. I use this term for the books that are actually out there
in the stores and in the schools, from K-12 language arts textbooks to
style manuals and college writing guides. Go and read them. I have
surveyed a good number of them. These are the books that _do_ make claims
like: the subject is what the sentence is about, or a pronoun replaces a
noun. In other words, regardless of how truly insightful the earlier
grammarians might have been, those insights have been boiled down to a
small set of conventional definitions and explanations that occur over and
over again across many books, as though everyone were using the same
source. And they don't become more complex or more refined as one
progresses through the grade levels.

As to what 'she' means in a sentence like 'She scored a goal', there are
at least two ways to look at it: in terms of its cohesive function, which
is to 'point to' its antecedent (while avoiding repetition of the full
noun phrase) and therefore maintain topic continuity
and coherence over stretches of discourse; and in terms of its referential
function, which is the one Einarsson mentions: it refers to a particular
girl. In psychological terms, it activates the conceptionualization of a
particular person over others in the mind of the listener/reader.

As to nouns designating 'substances', and therefore deserving the term
'substantive', I do think that one recent theory of grammar has an even
better solution: a noun designates a 'thing'; within this theory, 'thing'
is given a very precise definition in terms of conceptualization. See the
reference to Langacker at the end of this posting.

A lot of linguistic theories today also distinguish between 'nouns' and
'nominals'. 'Nouns' are individual words (or compounds) that behave in a
certain way grammatically; some theories also try to describe the semantic
content of the category 'noun' (e.g. the 'thing' theory mentioned above).
They are a 'part of speech', i.e. one category of word-types.  Nominals
are functional entities: they perform functions prototypically carried out
by phrases with nouns as head, such as subject, object, etc. In discourse
terms, nominals are referring expressions; in functional terms, they
provide arguments for predicates.

I take responsibility for my ignorance of grammar study before and during
the Renaissance. These works are on my reading list. Those who wish to
criticize contemporary linguistic analyses of English should take
responsibility for reading at least its major theoretical threads first.
Chomsky's is one, very narrow, tradition. Firth, Halliday and their
scholarly offspring are an important thread for understanding grammar in
context; American discourse analysis is another major contributor in a
similar vein. The work of Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, and George
Lakoff has made major contributions to understanding meaning and how it
relates to grammar and context. Here are two points of access:

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. "Nouns and verbs." Chapter 3 of _Concept,
image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar_, Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, pp. 59-100.

Hopper, Paul, and Sandra A. Thompson. 1984. "The discourse basis for
grammatical categories in universal grammar." Language 56:251-299.

Neither is easy reading, but then neither is Renaissance scholarship.
The first may be hard to track down; I would be glad to send a photocopy
to anyone who is interested. I have used both in graduate courses without
some success, so they are not completely inaccessible to non-linguists.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
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