Timeline for How can I prove a word is a noun?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
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| Mar 15, 2017 at 11:27 | history | edited | Edwin Ashworth | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 8 characters in body
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| Mar 2, 2015 at 23:30 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @Greg Lee Even OED seems to find POS determination sometimes beyond human capability. Janus Bahs Jacquet mentions the entry for sense 21 of 'solid' is labelled “quasi-adv.”. | |
| Feb 27, 2015 at 4:26 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | @GregLee: I was, and still am, not sure about your actual positions here. And I was, and still am, not sure what is serious and what isn't, so I merely replied to what you said on a basic level disregarding irony. | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 21:15 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @Cerberus, well, it might not be obvious that I was not making a joke or expressing my own opinion just now. I was answering your question about the gist of Max Müller's lectures. But there's more to it -- after all, it's a whole book, and it's one of the influential works in that wonderful time of discovery in the 19th century that shaped our modern views about the nature of language. | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 20:18 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | If 'linguistics is like a physical science', do ing-forms exhibit duality like photons? | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 18:38 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | @GregLee: Haha, in that case, I partly agree, partly disagree with it. Some things, such as reconstructing a Proto-Indo-European root, suppose an underlying truth, even if the methods to get there are too complex for enumeration (so not scientific); but other things, such as creating tests and word classes, do not suppose such a truth. They rather attempt to come to the most practical set of tools through a dialectical, hermeneutic process. And practical may not even be the only criterion. | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 11:24 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | It usually seems more like alchemy to me. | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 4:18 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @Cerberus, linguistics is like a physical science. | |
| Feb 26, 2015 at 2:03 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | @GregLee: I believe you, but they are a bit long...what's the gist? | |
| Feb 25, 2015 at 17:05 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @Cerberus, Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language from 1861 is still worth a read. It's free on line: gutenberg.org/files/32856/32856-h/32856-h.html | |
| Feb 25, 2015 at 16:51 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | @GregLee: Linguistics isn't a science, mostly. Now you know that grammatical categories aren't facts or truths. Any label is a choice, not a truth. | |
| Feb 25, 2015 at 4:34 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @Cerberus, I don't know of any official tests or agreed procedures for arriving at a truth of grammar. Or a truth of anything, for that matter. These methodological arguments seem unscientific, to me, and they don't interest me. | |
| Feb 25, 2015 at 2:29 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | @GregLee: We would like to test words against a fixed number of tests, but who gets to decide what the exact tests are? In the course of history, the list of tests has been changed, refined, criticised, etc. What if some of the tests say galore is a noun, while other tests say it is not? We decide on the tests based on whether they classify the right words as nouns, ones we already think should be nouns. But maybe we change our opinion on some of those words after applying the tests. Etc. This is called the hermeneutic circle, which is perhaps slightly less important in the sciences. | |
| Feb 22, 2015 at 14:28 | comment | added | Araucaria - Him | @Shoe, Edwin, very sorry, that was a misfire! I thought that Edwin's comment to Greg Lee here was underneath my answer post and addressed to me! | |
| Feb 22, 2015 at 8:51 | comment | added | Shoe | @Edwin. The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (p441) in its entry on word classes would agree with you: "There is no single correct way of analysing words into word classes." (Coincidentally or not, one of the co-authors of this reference work is Bas Aarts.) | |
| Feb 22, 2015 at 7:53 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | No; you're assuming that 'noun; verb; adjective ...' is somehow an axiomatic classification. The periodic table is, in that there is a one-to-one mapping between element and atomic number. But the parts of speech have been suggested as a useful classification system; the classes are arbitrary, and the theory has been refined over the years (and there is by no means an accepted standard classification today). For instance, one school of thought, as described by Aarts in the above extract, say that the 'painting' in 'John's slowly painting the portrait' is somewhere between noun and verb. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 15:05 | comment | added | Greg Lee | This is obscurantism. A chemist might be puzzled by a substance he couldn't classify; I might not understand "galore". What does it show? Some things are hard to figure out. It doesn't mean the nature of things is intrinsically mysterious. And I don't understand your "painting" example -- it's a verb. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 14:53 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | I must disagree. Or, to use your phrasing, you're wrong. For instance, the strange word 'galore' cannot be said not to be an adjective. It means a flamboyant display etc. But it's a determiner, meaning many. English isn't as well-behaved as macro chemistry. Perhaps one could mention the duality of light here, but I'd argue that that's a different type of implausible beast. // 'All the tests [give consistent results]' is manifestly untrue. 'John's slowly painting the portrait' gives contradictory results. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 13:06 | comment | added | Greg Lee | In my opinion, testing for nouns and verbs is just like doing a chemical analysis, and I meant my answer to illustrate this when I noted that all the tests are consistent. If one test says a word is a verb, so will other tests. It may not be immediately obvious whether a word is a noun or a verb, but the truth is out there -- it's one or the other, not some funny in-between thing. It's interesting to know about Hudson's theory, but it's wrong. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 12:44 | history | answered | Edwin Ashworth | CC BY-SA 3.0 |