The Noun Game

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:11 PM -0400 10/24/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>FWIW, after learning, starting in the fourth grade, that "a noun is
>the name of a person, place, or thing," in precisely those words, in
>high school (grades 9-12 in Saint Louis), I had to learn that a noun
>is simply a "name."
>
>My WAG is that, if you're going to be teaching that gerunds,
>infinitives, adjectives,  verbs, clauses, adverbs, etc. can all be
>"nominals" and that these nominals are, for all practical purposes,
>non-distinct from nouns, you need a less-concrete definition of
>"noun."

Or a less narrow definition of "thing".  After all, people can be
sweet young things, so I imagine time, sincerity, and such can be as
well, and if they can, why not gerunds and maybe even horses.  After
all, if we can imagine that wishes were horses, we must be
thingifying both of them.

LH

>
>-Wilson
>
>On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 7:19 PM, Dennis Baron <debaron at illinois.edu> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Dennis Baron <debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU>
>>  Subject:      The Noun Game
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>>
>>  The noun game: a simple grammar lesson leads to a clash of civilizations
>>
>>  Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing.
>>  It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom
>>  question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way
>>  we're used to viewing things.
>>
>>  That's exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English
>>  teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game
>>  seemed a way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it
>>  forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when
>>  cultures intersect and children get lost in the tyranny of school.
>>  That's a lot to get from a grammar game.
>>
>>  read the rest of this post on the Web of Language:  http://bit.ly/weblan
>>  ____________________
>>  Dennis Baron
>>  Professor of English and Linguistics
>>  Department of English
>>  University of Illinois
>>  608 S. Wright St.
>>  Urbana, IL 61801
>>
>>  office: 217-244-0568
>>  fax: 217-333-4321
>>
>>  http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron
>>
>>  read the Web of Language:
>>  http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>--
>-Wilson
>---
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"--a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-Mark Twain
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org