So far as I remember grammar, articles aren’t a separate part of speech. They’re adjectives.
I think there are two different meanings of the word “handful”. When used with substances, it means the amount one can hold in a hand, so one can, for instance, have a handful of flour. When used with countable objects, however, it means “approximately five”, so one can also have a handful of people.
Didn’t you read either of my posts? Not only did I claim that this notion has never been proposed in a peer-reviewed linguistics paper, I actually provided a simple argument to show that it is theoretically advantageous not to subsume the category of articles into the category of adjectives.
And keep in mind that these category distinctions are theoretical, despite what we might be led to believe in school. The English language does not come with some manual that definitively settles these matters; it’s up to linguists to try to figure out how the language works, using the kind of argumentation I employed in post #15.
That’s fine, but we’re not arguing linguistics so much as traditional grammar here. The words you’ve listed (“my, your,” etc) are traditionally called adjectives. So is a modifier like “this” or “that.” The function of “this” in “this cat” is described as adjectival in every English class I’ve ever taken. “A,” “an,” and “the,” belong to a separate class called articles, but have a similar function to “this” or “that.”
Thus, I don’t think it’s silly to advance the notion that an article is a special type of adjective–even though I treat them as different things, they are both noun modifiers.
But your simplistic deconstruction doesn’t rule out all sorts of adjectival sequences which do sound ungrammatical.
Compare:
He put on his big, brown Stetson hat.
He put on his Stetson brown big hat.*
He has a yellow car.
He has a yellow, yellow, yellow car.* (not unless you’re stuttering. If you’re argument that you can repeat “yellow” for emphasis, I’ll argue back that you can just as well repeat an article for emphasis.)
You can’t simply drop adjectives willy-nilly behind a noun and expect everything to work out grammitcally. They have their own order, too. In this case, you can argue that an article is a type of adjective, and in the rules of adjectival order, must come first and cannot be repeated.
Okay, “traditional grammar” is useful in studying the history of linguistics, but I am arguing that it is misinformed. This is like saying that we’re arguing alchemy, not chemistry.
Reread my point about categories and functions. You treat them as different things because they are different categories. Parts of speech are categories.
Yes, you are right, they are both noun modifiers. As I said, they can both function as adnominal modifiers, but they don’t have to. An adjective, for example, can also function as a predicative complement. If you really want to collapse the categories, how are you going to account for the following data?
good: My dog is big.
bad: My dog is the.
Yes, you could try that. But here is more evidence for the prudence of distinguishing adjectives from determiners:
good: My dog is big.
bad: My dog is the.
Besides, as soon as you say “articles must come first”, you are positing a category distinction, even if it is within adjectives. So what do we gain by calling them all adjectives? Well, it does give a single label to all noun modifiers. But we already have a label for that (“adnominal modifier”) and it describes a function, not a category. Parts of speech are categories.
The more I’m reading this, the more I think we don’t really disagree with each other.
If you’re talking lingustics, then yes, of course, it’s advantageous to have a separate category of determiners that include ALL the determiners, like "my, your, this, that, the, a/an, etc).
I’m just saying that in the way parts of speech are taught in English grammar books (not linguistic treatises), it’s not silly to lop articles into the adjective category, because words like “my, your, this, that, etc.” are classified in this way, and essentially perform the same function articles do.
Me too.
Agreed.
I contend that it is silly.
By whom? Traditional English grammar books? Maybe. But I content that it is silly.
I assume you meant “same function as adjectives do”. As I’ve been saying all along, function is not the same as category, and confusing the two notions is probably one of the many flaws with traditional grammar.
Again, it’s like calling a whale a fish. Even though this might be done by the uninformed, and doing so makes some practical sense, it doesn’t make it any less annoying to someone genuinely interested in biology.
Yes. I mean, look up “parts of speech.” So far as I know, there’s still teaching seven parts: articles, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and nouns.
And, yes, it is all a bit arbitrary and silly.
No, I meant “same category as articles,” if I’m understanding your distinction correctly. What I’m saying is that “that/my/your/the/a/an” are all determiners, as distinct from adnominal modifiers like “small/big/furry/fuzzy.”
The thing is, there’s a big difference of language when you talk with linquists and when you talk with grammarians. Linguistically, there are only two tenses in the English language: present and past. To an English teacher or grammarian, there are twelve major tenses (formed by combining the three times (past, present, future) with four aspects (simple, continuous/progressive/imperfect, perfect, and continuous perfect).
My initial objection was that you said nobody seriously considers articles a type of adjective. I do not doubt this is true among linguists, however among grammarians or English language pedagogues, this is not the case.
Remove “articles” and add “pronouns”, and then you’ll have the traditional categories I’m familiar with (some grammars also add “interjections” as an eighth part of speech). It is not all arbitrary silly, it’s just that it could stand to be updated based on modern linguistic theory.
“Adnominal modifier” is a term describing a function that both adjectives and determiners can fulfill, not just adjectives. that/my/your, etc., small/bigy/furry, etc., can all function as adnominal modifiers.
This distinction between category and function can be very tricky. I admit I’m fudging it myself by using the more familiar term “determiner” as a category label rather than a functional label (as a subtype of adnominal modifier). It has been suggested that the category label for the/a, etc. be “determinative”.
I basically agree with everything you say here. It’s just that I’m making a value judgment and saying that modern linguistics is superior to the ideas of traditional English teachers or grammarians.
For example, saying that there are twelve major tenses is a result of confusing morphological tense with semantic tense and aspect, which probably happened based on a faulty analogy with Latin, which did make all these distinctions explicitly morphological on the verb itself.
Modern linguistics points out, as you did, that there are only two morphological tenses. But it also theorizes about the use of auxiliary verbs in English to indicate other tenses and aspects. Clear distinctions are made between syntax, morphology, and semantics, among other things, to avoid the misconceptions of traditional grammar.
Whoops. I made a hash of that one, forgetting pronouns and interjections. Plus I was definitely taught articles as a separate part of speech, hence I grew up with nine parts of speech, not the seven I quoted.
True. But I just don’t think this distinction is important or useful at a reading/writing/average-user-of-English level. When studying linguistics, yes. When learning how to make a sentence in English, it tends to obfuscate more than elucidate.
If you look at this as a combination of two morphemes, “fire” and “engine”, clearly “engine” is what’s actually pluralized - you’re talking about more than one truck. Traditional grammar would call “fire” an adjective in this compound, which would make it nonsensical to talk about pluralizing it (in English; adjectives of course have plural forms in some languages.) I think more current linguistic theories call them both nouns, but I don’t have enough expertise to evaluate or explain those claims. Either way, though, “fires-engine” doesn’t make sense, since it’s “engine” that you’ve got more than one of. “Courts martial” and “attorneys general” come from a heavily French-influenced legal jargon - in a purer English legalese, it would be “martial court” and “general attorney” - either way, “court” and “attorney” are the nouns, and “martial” and “general” are, again, adjectives. Of course, probably due to the fact that syntactically “court martial” and “attorney general” don’t make much sense in English, people have begun to treat them as indivisible compounds, which makes the plurals “court martials” and “attorney generals” more plausible.
Linguistics tends to use more objective sorts of tests: “Handful” and “mouthful” are nouns because they can have determiners attached, they can be pluralized, and so forth - things that adjectives don’t usually do. Of course, the lines between different parts of speech are occasionally blurry in any language - the concept of “categories” is questionable. One model looks at things as “prototypes”: there is a sort of “prototypical noun” that refers to a physical object you could touch, see, etc. Abstract concepts like “time” or “truth” are less prototypical, and something like “mile” or “mouthful” less yet. And there’s some evidence for those things in language: less prototypical nouns (and verbs) tend to show less typical behavior in a linguistic sense - so they won’t do quite as well on the tests I mentioned above. For instance, you’d be unlikely to refer to “six truths” (not in the abstract sense of “truth”, anyway - it would only make sense if you used “truth” in one of its other meanings like “true statement”.)
But either way, “handful” and “mouthful” may not be precisely typical nouns, but they’re clearly nouns. You can use them like nouns, and that’s what really makes them nouns in a linguistic sense. “Dawn gave the handful to Bob” is grammatical (though admittedly odd-sounding), whereas *“Dawn gave the green to Bob” sounds quite out of the question to me.
Exactly, and this just goes back to my point about the distinction between function and category. “Fire” belongs to the category of nouns, but it can still function as an adnominal modifier, and in serving this particular function, it cannot be pluralized. Now in the case of “fire engine” you might argue that this is a morphological process rather than a syntactic one, but I think the idea is still clear.
Actually as an EFL teacher I stay away from the term ‘tense’ altogether, too often it is translated by the same word as ‘time’ in other languages which creates confusion for the learner. How can the Present Continuous be talking about future time ? :dubious: Instead I encourage learner to think about the ‘form’ of the verb linked to the function as being separate from the ‘time’ the verb is referring to. With less experienced teachers and certain students (reviewing with higher level or those for whom the ‘traditional’ explanaitions aren’t working) I do indeed explain that there are two ‘tenses’ with three forms of each (Simple, Cont. & Perfect - which is then sub-divided). Sometimes this approach helps things ‘click’ especially the Present Perfectives which are an alien concept in many European languages.
Warning hot button ! -I pretty much jump on any of my teachers who even dare to say that there is a Future Tense in English !!! No no no no no. We have a variety of structures and lexical items we use to talk about future time (inc. Pres. Simple, Pres. Cont., ‘to be going to’, ‘will’, intend to etc) but telling learners, at least those learning English as a foreign language, that there is a Future Tense is just asking for trouble, IMHO that is 
That was why I chose it as an example Excalibre , this part of my post was specifically in response to tygerbryght’s comment about how to pluralize handful & mouthful (which incidentally I say are nouns in my first post, I’m not arguing with that). It was only later that it dawned on me that in court martial for example the adjective was the second element which is why we pluralized ‘court’. Anyway my point was that we ‘never’ (as far as I dare say never with regard to the English language) add an ‘s’ in the middle of a word, albeit one which has developped from a common collocation, in order to make a plural. Then I tried to find an example where ‘handsful’ might be a reasonable pluralization of a handful. Obviously I wasn’t clear, I apologise.
PS I think what I refered to as a ‘countable’ noun in my first post is what you call a ‘prototypical’ noun; ‘truth’, in the EFL world would be an ‘uncountable’ or ‘mass’ noun.
Sorry for docking one of your 'l’s pulykamell
Sorry for the hijack:
sundog66, I’m a graduate of UCSB’s Linguistics program and am still living in Santa Barbara. Don’t suppose you’re afiliated with that program at all, are you?
Back on topic:
It’s been my experience that many modern linguists hold a certain amount of contemp for aspects of prescriptive grammar. Ultimately, relying on the justification of “that’s how it was (or is still) taught in schools” holds very little weight.
What did they teach you in school about how an airplane flies?
I was just sorta meandering there - the concept of “parts of speech” is an abstraction and a simplification - useful, like so many such things are, but not absolute.
“Count noun” and “mass noun” are definitely descriptions used by linguists, not just by prescriptive grammarians. A prototypical noun is definitely countable, while noncountable nouns are much less prototypical. But “prototypicality” is a fuzzy issue of degree, not a binary, yes/no feature. Viewing parts of speech in the context of prototypicality means looking at how “nouny” a noun is or how “verby” a verb is - how much a word displays the typical behavior of its cohorts. (A lot of aspects of language have been examined in the context of prototypes, not just parts of speech. It’s a broad idea.)