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Nouns in Context
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The Importance of Nouns & Noun Phrases
In our ESL/EFL grammar materials, lessons, and curricula, we often make the mistake of over-emphasizing verbs and forgetting about the central importance of nouns and noun phrases. Verbs are certainly important, but you can't say much without nouns!
In any sample of English--spoken or written--one of the 10 most common words is the. What does that suggest? Yes! Lots of nouns--because the just about always occurs with a noun.
Additionally, noun phrase structure is complex and often a puzzle for our students. We know that learning to use a/an and the with the right noun types for the right meanings is difficult for many students. And, the is one of the most common words, so the challenge meets students at every turn.
Take a look at these 3 samples from the sociology textbook that I'm using for many of my examples in this course.
Sample #1 has only 99
words with 9 verbs--but there are at least 22 noun phrases (and more if
we count the nouns inside of the longer noun phrases).
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Nouns in Generalizations A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook By the age of 4, children show guilt and shame. This indicates that a sense of self is developing, for guilt and shame require an awareness of being judged by others. By the age of 5 children also display pride, humility, envy, and jealousy - emotions that indicate growing "self-awareness." By age 6 or 7, having developed the ability to take the role of the other, children express emotions that indicate a judgment of the self in comparison with qualities that others possess. That is, they exhibit feelings about their own relative abilities, attractiveness, honesty, bravery, dominance, and popularity. |
Sample #2 has 122 words with 14 verbs and at least 16 noun phrases.
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Nouns in Narratives A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook The old man was horrified when he found out. Life never had been good since his daughter had lost her hearing when she was just 2 years old. She couldn't even talk - just fluttered her hands around trying to tell him things. Over the years, he had gotten used to that. But now he shuddered at the thought of her being pregnant. No one would be willing to marry her; he knew that. And the neighbors, their tongues would never stop wagging. Everywhere he went, he could hear people talking behind his back. If only his wife were still alive, maybe she could come up with something. What should he do? He couldn't just kick his daughter out into the street. |
Sample #3 has 213 words with 24 verbs and around 50 noun phrases.
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Nouns in Narratives A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr are identical twins born in 1932 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. They were separated as babies after their parents divorced. Oskar was reared in Czechoslovakia by his mother's mother, who was a strict Catholic. When Oskar was a toddler, Hitler annexed this area of Czechoslovakia, and Oskar learned to love Hitler and to hate Jews. He became involved with the Hitler Youth (a sort of Boy Scout organization designed to instill the "virtues" of patriotism, loyalty, obedience, - and hatred). Jack's upbringing provides an almost total contrast. Reared in Trinidad by his father, he learned loyalty to Jews and hatred of Hitler and the Nazis. After the war, Jack emigrated to Israel, where, at the age of 17, he joined a kibbutz. Later, Jack served in the Israeli army. In 1954, the two brothers met. It was a short meeting, and Jack had been warned not to tell Oskar that they were Jews. Twenty-five years later, in 1979, when they were 47 years old, social scientists at the University of Minnesota brought them together, again. These researchers figured that since Jack and Oskar had the same genes, whatever differences they showed would have to be due to the environment - to their different social experiences. |
Noun Phrase Complexity
Later this semester,
we'll look in more detail at the forms that can be combined to make noun
phrases, especially the use of prepositional phrases and relative clauses.
Here let's just notice that the noun phrases in these passages come in
lots of different shapes:
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| Noun phrase type | Example |
| single noun | children
life babies |
| determiner + noun | his wife
his mother's mother |
| determiner + adjective + noun | the old man |
| determiner + noun + prepositional phrase | a sense of self |
| noun + relative clause | emotions that indicate growing self-awareness |
| determiner + noun + infinitive | the ability to take the role of the other |
| determiner + (adverb + adjective) + noun | an almost total contrast |
| proper noun | Oskar Stohr
Czechoslovakia |
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We can also see that both the generic and specific meanings are mixed
together in both of these samples. Sample #1 has numerous generic
noun phrases with its generalizations about children and pride
and other emotions, but it also has specific reference with their own
relative abilities. The noun phrases in Sample #2 are primarily
specific in reference, but life is a generic noncount noun.
You can see some of that same mixture in Sample #3 although proper nouns
and other specific nouns predominate.
Noun Phrases in Context
Research has shown that different types of noun phrases tend to be characteristic of different discourse types.
In conversational spoken English, we tend to use everyday words and to repeat the same vocabulary over and over--especially in the same conversation on a single or a small set of topics. And, many of these nouns tend to be names with personal pronouns used to stand in for the name.
In academic writing, we tend to use much longer noun phrases as we try to be extremely accurate about complex information. Moreover, academic generalizations tend to be noun-centric: they use lots of long noun phrases and a very simple range of verbs. A noun or noun phrase can be repeated without using a pronoun--repeating a particular term that is the only way to talk about a concept in that field of study.
In fiction and other story telling, we tend to use a wider range of verbs to be accurate and interesting about the actions of the characters in the story and, as in conversation, to use a lot of names and personal pronouns.
We can see these tendencies
in our samples. Look at Sample #1 again--what is the grammar
of that sample like?
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Nouns in Generalizations A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook By the age of 4, children show guilt and shame. This indicates that a sense of self is developing, for guilt and shame require an awareness of being judged by others. By the age of 5 children also display pride, humility, envy, and jealousy - emotions that indicate growing "self-awareness." By age 6 or 7, having developed the ability to take the role of the other, children express emotions that indicate a judgment of the self in comparison with qualities that others possess. That is, they exhibit feelings about their own relative abilities, attractiveness, honesty, bravery, dominance, and popularity. |
Sample #2 tells a heart-rending story of a horrifying choice made by a father to make his daughter and her baby live in the attic of his home and the terrible results for the child. This sample is a narrative being used in a textbook to give dramatic background to the general topic of child development and to provide an example of the topic of feral children (and what sociologists try to learn about society by studying these unfortunate children). What's the grammar like? Well, it is very like the grammar of just about any story:generic nouns predominate--with the use of personal pronouns limited to they and their because of the focus on children as a group rather than on individual people
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Nouns in Narratives A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook The old man was horrified when he found out. Life never had been good since his daughter had lost her hearing when she was just 2 years old. She couldn't even talk - just fluttered her hands around trying to tell him things. Over the years, he had gotten used to that. But now he shuddered at the thought of her being pregnant. No one would be willing to marry her; he knew that. And the neighbors, their tongues would never stop wagging. Everywhere he went, he could hear people talking behind his back. If only his wife were still alive, maybe she could come up with something. What should he do? He couldn't just kick his daughter out into the street. |
Sample #3 presents the history of two men in a narrative format--telling the story here with many of the narrative-grammar features of Sample #2: names, past tense, personal pronouns. I've selected Sample #3 to show the use of names in a narrative so that we can add the use of proper nouns to our picture of the noun phrase in English. And these proper nouns can be terrifically difficult for people from different naming traditions, trying to figure out which name is the first or given name and which is the family name--and which to use to refer to people in different settings.
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Nouns in Narratives A Sample from an undergraduate sociology textbook Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr are identical twins born in 1932 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. They were separated as babies after their parents divorced. Oskar was reared in Czechoslovakia by his mother's mother, who was a strict Catholic. When Oskar was a toddler, Hitler annexed this area of Czechoslovakia, and Oskar learned to love Hitler and to hate Jews. He became involved with the Hitler Youth (a sort of Boy Scout organization designed to instill the "virtues" of patriotism, loyalty, obedience, - and hatred). Jack's upbringing provides an almost total contrast. Reared in Trinidad by his father, he learned loyalty to Jews and hatred of Hitler and the Nazis. After the war, Jack emigrated to Israel, where, at the age of 17, he joined a kibbutz. Later, Jack served in the Israeli army. In 1954, the two brothers met. It was a short meeting, and Jack had been warned not to tell Oskar that they were Jews. Twenty-five years later, in 1979, when they were 47 years old, social scientists at the University of Minnesota brought them together, again. These researchers figured that since Jack and Oskar had the same genes, whatever differences they showed would have to be due to the environment - to their different social experiences. |
In sum, all three kinds of writing use nouns but they tend to use slightly
different types with generic nouns in statements of theory (and other
generalizations--what Biber calls "informational" discourse), specific
nouns in the generalizated narrative, and proper nouns in the historical
narrative (with the names of people and places).
Learning Challenges with Nouns
What are the learning and teaching challenges related to nouns and noun phrases?
I'd like to close this section back where we began. Nouns and noun phrases are important and need to be given more time and study in ESL/EFL programs.
How can we contextualize the materials that we provide for our students to help them be knowledgable and skillful users of a wide variety of nouns and noun phrases? I'd like to know more about your ideas and look forward to learning from you about this important topic.
Please send me your questions and comments at patbyrd@comcast.net. Thanks.
References
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Master, P. (1990). Teaching the English articles as a binary system. TESOL Quarterly 24 (3), 461-498.
Reid, J. and Byrd, P. (1998). Grammar in the composition classroom. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.