Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

Philippe Caquant said:
> A Brown Bear is an animal whose property, among
> others, is to be brown. A Brown is not an animal, it
> is a property shared, among others, by Brown Bears.
> Saying "A Brown" instead of "a Brown Bear" looks very
> much like an ellipse, used to avoid repetition, and it
> is understandable only in the case you have introduced
> the concept of Brown Bear earlier in you speech
> (otherwise, it could refer to brown sugar for ex).
You're still talking about things you *say* as opposed to the concepts
that are behind what you say. No, everyday English will not let you say "a
brown" in the way you're using it, but that's a morphosyntactic constraint
-- mere happenstance of the way English grammar works. You don't need to
go any farther afield than German to be able to do this, though. German
adjectives are very commonly used in this way:

"gib mir 'nen braunen!" (give me a brown one.)

In German, 'braun' just refers to the property of having brown color, just
like 'brown' does. In English, you can't use adjectives without a copula
or a head to modify -- a syntactic constraint specific to English. That
constraint does not hold in German, so you can say "a brown" perfectly
easily. You may say that the German merely elides a noun which is
obviously grammatically masculine (hence the acc-masc endings on article
and adjective), but that's the point: braun/brown refers to a *property*,
and a property _always_ presupposes the object it's the property of. In
English, you have to insert a nondescript proform ('one') just to satisfy
the constraint of needing a head to modify; in German, you don't.

A noun is *not* something that refers to a "person, place or thing", a
verb is *not* something that refers to an "action, state or event" and an
adjective is *not* something that refers to a "quality or quantity" even
though that's probably still what people learn in school (or even
college). Those are philological definitions, specific to the single
language under discussion, not linguistic definitions.

In linguistics, nouns, verbs, adjectives and all the other traditional
(note: TRADITIONAL!) "parts of speech" (another philological term) are
merely classes of lexemes which are distributed morphosyntactically in
ways that are reminiscent of their prototypical namesakes in classical
Latin and Greek. They have (or should have) no particular theoretical
relevance for linguists merely because they played (and still play) an
important part in classical philology.

Some languages have lexical classes that seem similar enough to the
traditional parts of speech to warrant the label (if you think you need a
label).

Some languages do not.

(My judgement is that *most* languages do not, in fact.)


There is a cure for what's ailing you, though, so here's your
prescription: Procure a good linguistics workbook with lots of data
problems, and spend the next 60 days working all the problems. Ron
Langacker had one to go with his 70's intro to linguistics, and I assume
that SIL's morphology & syntax workbook continues to be reprinted. There
are probably others that I can't think of right now. After taking this
medicine over the next 60 days, you'll feel much better -- and you'll have
a much clearer understanding of just how varied this planet's languages
really are.


> "High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)
I wonder how Aristophanes proposed to measure the height of language. Much
less the height of thoughts...


-- Mark

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