Susan,

I'll hazard a stab at tackling this question you raised:

"Right now it is trendy to disparage an 8-parts-of-speech view of the world; those grammarians act like they are Copernicus and have discovered that the earth revolves around the sun.  Sorry, it's not even close to comparable.  If it's so damaging to think that way, give me a reason.  Why are kids poorly served by dividing all words into only 8 categories?"

I can't speak for all linguists, of course, but from my own viewpoint, there are actually two different objectionable characteristics of the eight-parts-of-speech model (or as I like to frame it, the OctoDogma). One is tied to the point that I think you're making: it presents the taxonomy *as* facty in the same way that gravity is, and that has bad consequences.  I know that when I go into Copernicus-in-a-dudgeon mode, it's not over the choice of the number eight; it's over the pretense that a particular number is part of the fundamental nature of language, or even just of English. It's the *denial* of subjectivity that inheres in the OctoDogma that's the objectionable part. And the anti-8 thing isn't just a modern trend, by the way -- eighteenth-century English grammars frequently used fewer or more than eight, and a number of nineteenth-century grammars used ten. 

There's an additional problem, and approaching it requires that I split your "only" away from your "eight." Most, or even all of us, I think, recognize that it's not useful to have a whole bucket of labels when trying to introduce a subject to young learners. Even someone who believes there's a "real" system of, say, twelve or thirty categories could easily collapse those into a smaller number by treating some distinctions as being of secondary importance. The problem is that it's hard to see any reason for having *eight* -- collapsing distinctions in English words in order to get something pedagogically useful is more likely to yield six, seven, or ten categories than eight. The OctoDogma tries to pin us to eight simply because Latin grammars had eight, and Latin grammars *didn't* have eight because eight worked really well for Latin. They had eight because Latin grammarians pulled a cut-and-paste routine with Greek grammars. In short, I (and I think a lot of other people) DON'T object to "only eight" in any strict sense; we object to the usual eight because they're a kludge.

Here's a practical example. Traditionally, we've got adjectives (and Latinate grammar lumps words like "green" together with words like "the" together in that) and adverbs (which include words that modify verbs along with words that can never, ever, modify verbs). If we decided, reasonably, that we should base the categories on what the word modifies (in a very loose sense of "modify"), we'd have three categories, not two (noun-modifiers, verb-modifiers, and other-modifiers). If we don't want to have three categories, it would be logical to just have a category of modifiers, and thus collapse the adjective/adverb distinction. There's no real logic to saying that the distinction between "modifies noun" and "modifies verb" is more important than the distinction between "modifies verb" and, say,  "modifies whole sentence." 

Frankly, for an initial set of terms, I'd be happy with noun, verb, modifier, and connector, and make sure I mentioned early on that a given word could be in more than one category (my instinct is to color-code them, so that if nouns are blue and modifiers are green, I could just deal with a troublesome word by saying it's blue-green). Pronouns could just be "placeholder" nouns or modifiers instead of a separate category (pronouns are pastel!). Later on, I'd start splitting that four into subcategories based on additional distinctions (starting by making an open-class/closed-class distinction). The point here is just that I'd be making decisions based on what I thought had pedagogical utility, not based on Donatus's dependence on Greek grammars. As it's implemented in K-12, the OctoDogma prevents teachers, and students, from *thinking* about language. 

From my perspective, the worst problem with the OctoDogma is the argumentation that is used to sustain it (I'm *not* reacting to Susan's, or anyone else on the list's, comments here; people on this list do give reasons for things; it's the public discourse that I'm whinging about).  As an academic, I expect someone defending a taxonomy to give me some reasons why that taxonomy is better than others, and if they can't, I expect them to adopt a kind of "oh, well, there are multiple possible taxonomies here" attitude. I'd even go along with "The cost/benefit analysis says changing what we have will cost more than it buys us" (I'd grumble, but grumbling is what academics *do*; it usually just means we don't have a fever).  What I can't take is a response that boils down to "I don't care what you say, I'm going to say my taxonomy is better than anything else and I don't have to have reasons." What I actually hear most often goes past that and straight to "N'uh-uh. I'm right."

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