a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things (common noun) , or to name a particular one of these (proper noun).
Forgive me for intruding, but this traditional definition is absurd. It only makes sense if you already know what a noun is. Why is “acceptance” a thing, when “accept” isn’t? While the simplest nouns certainly denote people, places, or things — and LFN can use this as a guide for assigning parts of speech to its root words — lots of other nouns don’t. The only reason to have the concept of “noun” at all is to help discuss the structure of sentences. Look at the remaining definitions in this list: they’re structural: “the main part of the predicate”, “this modifies that”, “coordinates words in a clause”, etc. As you suggest in the preceding section, nouns form the arguments to predicates. See also the section “Names for things” in Wikipedia’s entry on Nouns. Simon
I am well aware that you don’t agree! But, despite the possibility of another one of our unending debates on things unending, I will respond! 🙂
These debates are good. I always learn something — often a lot — from them. Simon
Here’s a piece of the wikipedia article:
In traditional school grammars, one often encounters the definition of nouns that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition. It has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being uninformative.[citation needed] Contemporary linguists generally agree that one cannot successfully define nouns (or other grammatical categories) in terms of what sort of object in the world they refer to or signify. Part of the conundrum is that the definition makes use of relatively general nouns (“thing”, “phenomenon”, “event”) to define what nouns are.
The semantic definition is, of course, the kind I prefer. They are difficult, but to me the only kind that have significance beyond being useful when discussing syntax.
I don’t understand why you want a non-syntactical definition for a concept of syntax. Simon
syntax (and morphology and phonotactics and semantics…) exist for the purpose of connecting experience (or things, or ideas, or…) and utterances in a way that is useful to us. syntax is a way of “linearizing” the “nonlinear”, if you take my meaning, and its constituents (nouns, verbs, et al.) are parts of the process. we do not learn language by memorizing lists of words and their placement in categories that follow rules. we learn to place words in their syntactic categories on the basis of the features of the things that the words refer to.
“Linearizing the nonlinear” — absolutely. I often think of it as flattening a tree. Simon
First, that last sentence. Of course the definition makes use of general nouns! So does any definition! That is no “conundrum”.
Actually, most definitions don’t rely on general nouns. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to learn a word’s meaning by consulting a dictionary. When you get down to defining the small number of fundamental terms, such as “idea”, “thing”, “space”, that’s when the head-scratching comes in! “Noun” is a technical concept. To define it as “a word for a thing” is preposterous. When I’ve talked to non-linguists about this — people who were taught the traditional definitions at school — they’ve often been very foggy about what’s a noun and what’s a verb. This may also say something about the poor standard of grammar teaching in Britain in the latter part of the twentieth century 🙂Simon
regarding the teaching of grammar - people have been using nouns “correctly” (as per their language in the context of their culture and era) since the beginning of time.
I don’t disagree. People are able to speak languages without being able to explain how they work — rather like I drive my car. They’ve unwittingly mastered the patterns that the grammar describes.
regarding definitions: nearly all definitions start by identifying the class of objects to which x belongs - i.e. a more general noun: a pigeon is a bird is a living thing…. naturally, additional qualities, features, etc need to be specified to differentiation pigeons from other birds, etc.
This is certainly true, but even so, we don’t directly define a pigeon as a thing. We define it as a bird. Most general terms are still fairly specific. My point was that it’s unhelpful to include the very general word “thing” in the direct definition of the very specific word “noun”. Simon
And the definition “contemporary linguists” prefer “a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.” - makes use of words, clauses, verbs, and prepositions, etc. The article itself admits “it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example, “in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns as words that are modified by definite articles.”
But why on earth should the concept of “noun” have the same definition in all languages? Isn’t this the same mistake the traditional grammarians made when they tried to explain modern languages in terms of the grammatical structure of Latin? This is the origin of the bizarre beliefs among English-speakers that split infinitives are bad, that you have to say “he is taller than I” not “me”, and that you can’t use a preposition to end a sentence with. Simon
ah, but I don’t think it was a mistake - just an understandable lack of sophistication! certainly, linguists started with somewhat ethnocentric ideas, but if nouns don’t have some commonality across languages, what meaning do they have at all? again, if you define them only in relation to other parts of speech, you are engaged in circularity. the “bizarre beliefs” you mention have nothing to do with my point.
Their mistake was caused by a lack of sophistication, a lack of hindsight, but it was still objectively a mistake. And I’m not denying that prototypical nouns have a strong commonality across languages. All I’m saying — and I’m grateful to you for making this clearer in my mind — is that the syntactic category known as “noun” is not the same thing as its set of prototypical members. Simon
The question a linguist should ask (regarding how to define a noun), I believe, is “how does the language user know that x is a noun, and not some other part of speech?” If it is solely by means of its relationships with other parts of speech, then how does one define the other parts of speech? A noun is a word that can be modified by an adjective - and an adjective is a word that can modify a noun. Not productive at all. In fact, circular.
I would argue that most speakers of English don’t know what a noun is. They speak by repetition of familiar patterns, not by grammatical analysis. A noun isn’t well defined by saying it’s a word that can be modified by an adjective, any more than a tree is well defined by saying it’s something you can shelter beneath in a rainstorm. Remember also that “to define” literally means “to set the boundaries”. A word is partly defined by the location of its boundaries with other words: it occupies a particular delimited area of semantic space. What it isn’t is often as important as what it is. It’s therefore not totally hopeless for the terms in an area of knowledge to support each other like a house of cards. However, I’m not convinced that the definitions of parts of speech even do so — it may just be that they are most clearly explained by mention of the similarities and differences between them.
they certainly do know (albeit unconsciously) that certain words are used in certain ways, which we who care about such things call a noun. the “certain ways” (functions within structures) is the syntactical part of the meaning of noun. the “certain words” is certainly NOT a list of words that we have learned (again, probably unconsciously) to place under the rubric (conscious or no) of noun! these “certain words” are tied to all sorts of experiences which have some degree of commonality. nouns prototypically refer to “things”, which have a degree of physicality to them, retain certain qualities for extended periods, do not change dramatically…. a good guideline to these abstractions is that we can point to them (the prototypical semantics of determiners - hence the syntactical connection between nouns and dets) and they are capable of moving in space (or specifically not moving) or altering positions in relationship to other “things” (or specifically not), etc (let’s call these “prototypical verbs”). as a child matures (or as the culture of human beings evolves), one begins to need to express thoughts and other experiences involving “things” less protoypical, which fit the syntax of the prototypical nouns if not the more obvious referents. we want to talk about an event that includes both objects and actions; we want to talk about the idea of an action; we want to talk about “socialism” and “capitalism” and so on. then we create the broader range of nouns, and we need to use qualifiers to name them, such as “abstract nouns”, “gerunds”, “infinitives”, and the like. we recognize these, too, by their referents!
Yes, speakers certainly do have unconscious knowledge of how each word is used, and of the patterns of similarity between them. This is grammar in the mind, and without it, we wouldn’t be able to communicate intelligently. I never said that speakers have learned a list of nouns, a list of verbs, etc. I said that the only way to clarify exactly what is meant by “thing” in the traditional definition of “noun”, or “action” in the traditional definition of “verb”, is to supply such a list. This is partly because “thing” is nebulous, and partly because non-prototypical members exist. Thanks for the remark about determiners and pointing to things — I’d never consciously made that connection before, but it’s clearly sound. And yes, I agree that children learn the prototypical members first, and extrapolate later. (Note to self: must read more about child language acquisition 🙂Simon
“you say the remaining definitions are structural. But only a part of their definitions is structural, which is appropriate in that they are words that attempt to discuss syntax. The parts in those definitions that I italicized are semantic.
A verb is “a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence”. In what sense “describe”? So if I describe someone’s dancing (an action) as impressive, “impressive” is a verb. No… So “dancing” is a verb. No… “Action, state, or occurrence” is a property of a verb, but not a definition. Someone might well say: “what do you mean by an ‘occurrence’?” And then you would list some verbs that fall under that heading. But then all you’re ultimately doing is saying “a verb is one of the following words” — (deep breath) — and then a list of all the verbs in the language. That’s not a definition. By contrast, verbs can be precisely defined in syntactic terms, which is unsurprising given that “verb” is a technical term of syntax! Simon
the “action, state, or occurrence is a property of a verb!? not at all: it is the referent of the verb. if anything, you should say that the verbs use within a sentence is a property of the verb!
You’ve misunderstood my poorly phrased point. All I was saying is that “action”, “state” and “occurrence” aren’t sufficient to define “verb”. Prototypical verbs denote these things, but not all of them do, and other things besides verbs do so as well. I don’t think we disagree here. Simon
You mention that I say “nouns form the arguments to predicates”. That is how nouns are used syntactically - which, as I point out, is only half of their definition. “arguments to predicates” does not complete the meaning of noun, or it would be another word for argument!
I was oversimplifying to avoid endlessly repeating myself. In LFN, a noun phrase is a syntactic component that functions as a dependent (subject or object) of a verb or a dependent of a preposition. Simon
The thing that seems to get people off the semantic track is that each language takes words from other categories, such as taking what is essentially an action and creating an abstract noun or a participle from it. Then one points out that acceptance isn’t really a thing. And you are right - it is an idea (which, at least in English, is treated as a kind of thing) that is derived from an act, and which therefore requires further explanation. It is not an example that destroys the idea of a semantic root for the parts of speech. Jorj
Certainly a language can convert words from one part of speech to another. That’s a structural thing. It lets you take a word, and reuse it at a new position in the structure. In LFN, we have a very clear process of derivation, and we carefully choose the basic structural category of each word. We do so partly by considering whether it’s semantically similar to a typical verb, noun, or adjective, and partly by copying existing structures (such as where we arbitrarily decide that all shapes and colours are primarily adjectival). As I’ve said, semantics are a good guide in many cases. But not everything fits cleanly into the three categories: it’s rather like the weird cases one encounters when playing “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral”. At the end of the day, semantics is woolly. The syntactic structural categories, on the other hand, can be precisely defined. Simon
To say that English treats “ideas” as kinds of “things” just begs the question of what counts as an idea. Deep breath, list of nouns. Simon
no: not a list of nouns. one needs to define “idea” (what qualities distinguish it from an “object” for example), not give a list!
Yes, but it’s impossible to do that comprehensively without providing a list. This doesn’t matter, because you’re talking about prototypical members, while I’m talking about the pure syntactic category. Both these concepts exist and are valid. My gripe with the traditional definition is that it doesn’t make it clear how the two concepts differ, or indeed that there are even two concepts involved. Simon
To expand on my point about definitions and boundaries: There are lots of things that we call “birds”. Some are more “birdy” than others: a penguin is less birdy than a sparrow. The same is true of almost anything. I’m not denying that the most “nouny” nouns represent physical objects, or that the most “verby” verbs represent actions, or that the most “adjectivey” adjectives represent qualities. But if you define “noun” as a word denoting a person, place, or thing, you fail to catch everything. The only way to catch everything is to recognize that “noun” is nothing more than a syntactic category — albeit one whose most “central” members represent physical objects — and then define it accordingly. Simon
you almost appear to agree with me! if there are indeed certain “most central members” (which I call prototypes), this has some significance other than chance! why are they “most central”? because they are the best representatives of the function of nouns (to take verbs and adjectives in such-and-such a manner). and why are they the best representatives? because the idea of noun starts with them!
I do agree with you! As so often in non-face-to-face communication, we’ve been talking slightly at cross-purposes without realizing. Simon