Hi,
would you really want to say that
nouns (which tend to take number and gender rather than tense oraspect) realize
entities (which tend to be countable andclassifiable)
especially if youtake out the obfuscatory brackets/argument
nouns realize entities
Maybe Chris reallyis raising issues which need to be given careful thought,
Kieran
On Wednesday, 16 February 2022, 05:20:00 GMT, 데이브드켈로그_교수_영어교육과
<dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ed:
If I understand you correctly, you worried that the claim that there is a
natural relationship between meaning and wording is circular, because it rests
on evidence such as the fact that nouns (which tend to take number and gender
rather than tense or aspect) realize entities (which tend to be countable and
classifiable) while verbs realize actions (which unfold over time). Number
seems to have a natural relationship with entities and tense with time.
Similarly, there are common nouns to represent universals and proper nouns to
represent individuals, but there do not appear to be proper verbs to represent
unrepeatable acts. This appeared circular to you because it says that nouns
have these properties, and of course anything having these properties are nouns.
That this is NOT a circular argument should become clear if you apply it to the
relationship between wording and sounding. It is not true that the word "loud"
has be be spoken loudly and only marginally true that words that begin with
nasals have something to do with your nose. So the relationship between meaning
and wording is at the very least MORE natural than that between wording and
sounding (or rather--between wording and articulation, because the relationship
between wording and prosody is actually natural).
But I also deny that the fit between word classes and semantic categories (or,
for that matter, the "context-metafunction hook-up" that Hasan always talked
about) really is the crucial evidence. First of all, the philosophical argument
for a natural relationship is unanswerable: we're part of nature, not some
supernatural force. Secondly, there is the phylogenetic argument: I can't think
of any element of semantics or phonology that doesn't have some obvious
counterpart in the animal world (this is why Halliday insists on
"consciousness" rather than "mind"). Thirdly, there is the ontogenetic
argument: until roughly two or three, children have a "natural" semantics and a
"natural phonology" and their first attempts at putting the two together (e.g.
Nigel's "intonational" grammar) appear to be natural (i.e. prosodic and not
articulatory) as well. For the very young child, it is actually true that the
word "loud" has to be spoken loudly, and that words that begin with nasals have
something to do with sneezles, sniffles, snot, snogging and snoutishness.
dk
David KelloggSangmyung University
New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
Vygotsky’s pedology of the adolescent: the discovery of sex and the invention
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