Delahunty and Garvey
someone who accepts the phrase as grammatical will readily agree that it is not
a typical use of the word singing. Thus we might conclude that the capacity to
be made plural is an expected—though not essential—condition for nouns.
You might object that the notion of prototypes leads to linguistic anar-
chy. Perhaps there are no essential conditions. Moreover, if standards are
flexible, aren’t we in danger of measuring with a rubber ruler? This reaction,
however initially reasonable, has no real justification. In fact, our position
allows the maintenance of analytic standards without reducing grammar
either to legalistic rigidity or anarchic mush.
For one thing, English itself is grammatically flexible. The prevalence
of conversion from one part of speech to another with no formal change
provides one clear example. English allows almost any word to be converted
to another part of speech, at least in restricted contexts, as the following sug-
gest:
(1) a. Ifs, ands, or buts (Subordinating and coordinating conjunc-
tions to nouns)
b. Whys and wherefores (Interrogatives to nouns)
c. But me no buts. (Coordinator to verb and noun)What we see here are instances of linguistic creativity, the ability to
make infinite use of finite linguistic resources, which as we’ve seen, is
characteristic of all languages. Clearly, the concepts we use to describe
language should be able to account for the linguistic characteristics we
actually observe. Categories arranged around prototypes and which allow
fuzzy boundaries allow us to do this. Such categories do not require that
we abandon our standards of linguistic usage; rather, they should encour-
age us to study and understand the language as it is used, not merely judge
it on the basis of simplistic a priori assumptions.
Lest this sound too abstract, let’s consider some practical consequences of
the fact that not all criteria apply to every word in a class. One consequence
is that we must accept that all major classes of words consist of subclasses of
those words, e.g., those nouns that cannot be made plural (e.g., information,
independence). Some of the nouns that cannot be made plural constitute the
subclass of non-count (mass) nouns, though there are many other subclasses
of nouns, of which we’ve seen a few. Teachers should be knowledgeable
about the most important subclasses of words and their linguistic proper-
ties, e.g., count and non-count nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs, and
so on, and be able to accurately present them to their students, especially to
those students whose first language is not English.