Two corrections, from the standpoint of linguistics, to two recent
posts.
1) From Eduard Hanganu: "how can you [sic] students identify the simple
subject, the simple predicate, and the objects in a sentence if they
do not know the parts of speech?"
Single words do not fill roles such as subject, predicate, direct
object, and so on. These are clause-level ROLES that are filled by a
variety of types of structures: subjects can be noun phrases, pronouns,
clauses, and, some even claim, prepositional phrases*. If a single noun
occupies the subject slot, that is just a case of the smallest possible
subject constituent. But if a sentence has a noun-phrase subject, the
whole phrase is the subject, not the head noun. The subject of "The
pre-school children in room 5 are going to the park this afternoon" is
"The pre-school children in room 5", not "children". "Children" is the
head of the subject phrase. Nominals fill these roles (see below).
Ex.: "Under the bed is all dusty." (R. W. Langacker)
2. Phil Bralich claims all entities or things are nouns. A noun is a
class of word; classes of words are elements of language; language is a
mental phenomenon. Nouns exist only in the minds of human beings. You
cannot point to something in the world, like a rock, and say it is a
noun. Word meanings are concepts, not things outside the mind. When we
are exposed to the world, we make a mental record of our experience; we
see things like rocks and form a concept of rocks. We learn to
associate a word ("rock") with the concept. Then we classify words
into categories based on certain _perceived_ features of the things and
on discourse needs. The prototypical entity likely to be named by a
noun is (a) concrete (b) clearly differentiated from other entities (c)
time-stable, that is, it does not change its essence or properties very
fast; (d) it is internally differentiated, that is, it has parts that
are different from each other; (e) it is countable.
The fewer of these properties an entity is perceived to have, the less
likely it is to be named by a noun. Also, the fewer of these properties
it has, the fewer noun inflection "privileges" it will have, such as
being able to be pluralized.
Perception and cultural conditioning are extremely important. Not all
languages assign the same phenomena to the noun and verb classes.
In response to Craig and others, I believe it is very helpful to teach
students how to use inflectional tests like adding plural -s to
identify a word's class. It's like a basic definition in mathematics --
not sexy, but part of the basic equipment. Much more can be said about
nouns, of course, and should, according to the students' level.
I spoke in another message of the difference between class and
function. "Nominal" is the function that clauses play when they are
subjects or direct objects; in fact, "nominal" is the superordinate
term for structures that play roles like subject, direct object, and so
on. "Nominal" is a discourse function for referring and for supplying
something to which we can assign a predicate (say something about).
My own textbook takes a thoroughgoing cognitive/functional approach
(along with structural descriptions) to English grammar. If all goes
well, it will be out by summer of '07 or a little later.
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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