The exploration of nouns

Year after year, students are taught that a ‘noun’ is ‘the name of a person, place or thing’ which only tells them that a noun is a name. It tells them nothing about what nouns really are and what are their properties and functions. It does not even make any attempt at exploring what students and teachers already know about nouns subconsciously. That exploration may be far more rewarding for teachers and students and they may begin to appreciate the nature, properties and functions of nouns and noun phrases; they will also begin to realise that what is true of nouns in English is also true of sangya in other languages. Given appropriate pedagogical techniques rooted in multilingualism, they may begin to examine these aspects of nouns in other languages available in the classroom.

There are things you can or cannot do to nouns. You can use articles such as ‘a, an, the’ or demonstratives such as ‘this, that, these, those’ etc before nouns (‘a girl’, ‘that girl’). You can also use quantifiers and adjectives before nouns (‘those four tall girls’). A whole clause can be added after a noun (phrase) such as ‘those four tall girls who are playing football’. In any variety of English, it would be ungrammatical to say ’four those tall girls who are playing football’.

Thus, you make nouns plural, qualify them with articles, demonstratives, quantifiers and adjectives in a certain order and you can also modify them with clauses. You can do all these things to the Hindi noun ladkii (girl) also. It would be perfectly grammatical to say ‘ve chaar lambii ladkiyaan jo futbol khel rahiin hain’.

There are things you can do to verbs but not to nouns. Thus, to say ‘girling’ or ‘girled’ will be ungrammatical whereas ‘arriving’ and ‘arrived’ are fine. Note that you hear the sound ‘z’ (represented by the letter ‘s’) in both ‘girls’ and the verb ‘digs’ but it means entirely different things in these two cases. In ‘girls’ it signifies ‘plurality’ but in ‘digs’ it stands for ‘third person, present tense, singular number’. Instead of engaging with this subconscious knowledge that all children bring to school, we teach them bland notional definitions of the kind indicated above.

While working on different languages, students may realise that nouns can function either as subjects or as objects such as ‘Boys are playing football’; ‘I like those boys.’ Languages will also have a way of indicating possession by a given noun such as ‘boy’s book’. How is possession indicated in Kannada or other languages available in the classroom? What is the difference between boys and boys’? They will also discover that pronouns which replace nouns as the text grows, act as a glue that holds the text together.

Thus, what a word should be called depends on the way it has been used. Meaning of a word or sentence indeed depends on the context of its use but even the grammatical category of a given word is not fixed. The four major categories of words are NAVA words - Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs and Adverbs. A simple word like ‘close’ which will generally be taught as a Verb in schools can actually belong to any of the NAVA categories. Consider: ‘Towards the close of the play she cried’ (N); ‘Only my close friends are coming to the party’ (Adj); ‘She closed the door’ (V); ‘Stay close to your mother’ (Adv). A website lists 56 words that could belong to the NAVA group. The number of words that can be both nouns and verbs in English is indeed very large. For example, ‘chair, copy, table, insult, nail, dance, bargain, favour, attack, cook’ among others.

The interesting thing is that such aspects of knowledge about language require no explicit teaching; both learners and teachers already have this knowledge. Instead of the insufficient notional definitions, teachers need to spend time on challenging tasks that would lead to an exploration of this knowledge bringing it from the subconscious to the conscious level. The dividends of such an exercise are enormous. Language of every student finds a space in the classroom. The cognitive abilities of data observation, classification, categorisation, analysis and inferencing come into play and working in peer groups students arrive at reliable and valid hypotheses. Most of all students and teachers will realise that all languages are equally systematic and deserve the same respect.

(The author is currently Professor Emeritus, Vidya Bhawan Society in Udaipur)