Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are very different entities in the linguistic universe, and represent very different entities in the physical world and in the mental world in which we live.
Nouns are the OBJECTS in the external (“objective”) world that we observe through the senses, as well as the SUBJECTS who observe. In sentences, too, the subject and the object are normally either nouns or pronouns (“proxies” for nouns). Nouns are the scaffolding of the perceived and conceived world, the nodes of the networks of interaction.
Verbs are PREDICATES in sentences and denote ACTIONS in the external world. They represent process, dynamism, change — but also their opposites, as in “lies down”, “neglects”, or “denies”. Verbs are the connecting links in the networks of interaction, the directed arrows between subjects and objects.
Adjectives are descriptors, evaluators, judgments. They create the “semantic space” discovered and studied by Charles Osgood and his associates. But more about that later.
Now we shall turn to give a little more detail about each.
Nouns specify the objects (like tables and chairs) which we learn to recognize, as infants, as soon as we manage to interpret somewhat the sensual (especially visual) information that floods our brain from the moment of birth. At an early age, we learn to recognize the “constancy of objects”, i.e. the fact that objects persist even when we are not looking at them. This notion, of course, cannot be a direct observation, which is why philosophers (unlike infants) have had trouble with it. It is already an early “scientific” inference made by the child, a theory that best explains experience, though it can never be “proved”. It is so firmly grounded empirically in everyone’s everyday consciousness (philosopher as much as layman) that in practice solipsism is treated as irrevelant nonsense by the average brain, even if theoretically discussed by intellectuals. It is an absurdity: why would anyone bother to lecture on solipsism or write a paper about it if he/she really believed it? Who would be there to hear or read it?
Nouns (objects) represent external reality “out there” as opposed to our self-definition as a self (a subject). This, too, is a distinction every child makes at a certain age. (Although, as was mentioned, subjects are also denoted by nouns, we are here concentrating on their use to denote objects.) Nouns as object descriptors define the environment with which we have to coexist as organisms, in order to survive. We also use them for pleasure, to enhance our quality oflife.
Nouns comprise not only “hard” inert objects (which we might call “things”), but also living objects, i.e. plants, animals, and persons, with which we interact in a different way. In interacting with things, we do not have to take into consideration their wills or intentions, be they friendly or hostile; with living beings, we do. Plants may be a transitional case; they do react to stimuli, but so slowly (except for flytraps) that we usually see them as inert.
Wills and intentions become more salient when we deal with persons rather than animals. In terms of Anatol Rapoport’s scheme of “Fights, Games, and Debates”, we FIGHT against inanimate things, trying to use them or master them, or guard against them as against natural disasters; we play (deadly) GAMES with animals when we hunt them or when they hunt us — we do the same with human enemies in war, when we “dehumanize” or “depersonify” them in our minds; but we DEBATE with persons, both friends and opponents, in peacetime. There are, of course, also cooperative modes of interaction: using natural resources with restraint so as to conserve them, and living symbiotically rather than parasitically or as predators with animals and people.
There is a third category of “objects” that nouns describe: these are abstract concepts, like love, hate, pride, humility, conservation, destruction. We also form “relationships” with concepts; we accept or reject them, they give us pleasure or pain, they seem true or false, we manipulate and rearrange them into “systems”. These relationships to concepts are called “attitudes” and the systems of them are “ideologies”. How we relate to concepts also has survival significance, like our relations to things, but in a more long-range, more complex way.
A sub-categoryt of a noun is a pronoun, something that stands for a noun. Some of the distinctions noted above can be summarized by Buber’s scheme of pronouns — showing the difference between an “I -it” and an “I — thou” relationship that I can have with a person — perceiving and treating him or her either as a means (a “thing” or an “it”), or as an end (a real person, equivalent in worth to myself). Kant’s categorical imperative would sanction only the “I — thou” relationships between persons as moral, never the “I — it” relationship.
Nouns as entities are noumenal (in some of their uses), endowed or imbued with their own significant meaning, sacred. We tend to sometimes capitalize them in writing to show this. While the word “noumenal” probably is not derived from the word “noun”, its sound in English is reminiscent of it, like a poetic echo.
Verbs are very different from nouns, a world apart. While nouns have to do with thought (both concrete and abstract), verbs are concerned with action. Nouns are descriptors of what we perceive with our senses to be “out there” (i.e. what the afferent parts of our nervous system bring to the brain as input); and also with some further processing by the brain to organize this input into concepts. Verbs, on the other hand, have to do with the efferent parts of the nervous system, the parts that communicate our output to the environment. The nouns are the stimulus, the verbs are the response. At the neuron level, nouns come in through the dendrites, verbs go out through the axons. Verbs denote how we affect our environment, act upon it, either adapt to it or change it.
If nouns are “being”, verbs are “becoming”. Other such distinctions are between state of a system and process of change, between static and dynamic models, between equilibrium and flux, between Zeno and Heraclitus.
Yet verbs can be passive as well as active. A stone just lies there, while a beetle crawls, a deer runs, a bird flies, a fish swims. Also a person can keep still or talk, refrain from action or engage in action. So verbs denote not only action, but also inaction or lack of action.
Verbs have been used in a method of analyzing world events, called events data analysis. In this method, daily newspapers (preferably several in different countries), are used to record “who did what to whom”. The “actors” and “targets” are, of course, nouns; usually nation-states, but sometimes international organizations like U.N. agencies, or terrorist groups, or churches, or NGOs like the Red Cross, Amnesty International, or Greenpeace; or criminal syndicates like the Mafia. But the verbs (the “did what” part) are especially important here. In Edward Azar’s scheme, the verbs are scaled on a conflict-cooperation scale, all the way from total war to a peaceful merger. In the WEIS scheme, the verbs are categorized in a more qualitative, but implicitly more multidimensional, manner. Cooperative verbs are: “approve, promise, agree, yield, grant reward”. Conflictual verbs are: “reject, protest, deny, accuse, warn, threaten, expel, seize, force.” A neutral verb is “comment”. These are only examples.
A survey of U.N. General Assembly resolutions documented the relative frequency of the use of such verbs as “recommends, requests, calls upon, urges, appeals, demands, condemns, deplores”. In the 1988 session, “calls upon” was used approximately 175 times, “urges” 170 times, “condemns” over 70 times, “recommends” only 33 times. In the Fifth Committee, which deals with administrative and financial matters, verbs such as “decides, approves, endorses, resolves, authorizes, agrees, accepts” were most often used.
In any case, these point-like daily events, and the background “flows” of goods, services, infonnation, and people across national borders which are not reported in newspapers because they are so omnipresent as to not constitute “news”, form the basic content of “international relations”. In the science of International Relations, this is the dependent variable which. is to be explained, perhaps in terms of national attributes such as size, population, wealth, military power; or in terms of personalities of leaders, or the nature of internal regimes, or past histories of the interaction, or the general constellation of the international system (bipolar, multipolar, or otherwise). And since these events and flows are largely expressed as verbs, we might say that verbs dominate world politics, for better or for worse.
Adjectives evaluate or judge objects and actions, i.e. both nouns and verbs). Along with adjectives (which modify nouns), we should also include here adverbs (which modify verbs). Since their functions in language and thought are very similar, we will omit the further mention of adverbs, and talk only about adjectives.
The main three dimensions of what Charles Osgood calls “semantic space” are adjective pairs, each constituting the opposite polar ends of a scale; good-bad (evaluation, or E), strong-weak (potency or P), and active-passive (activity or A). This semantic space was constructed, not by armchair philosophizing, but from empirical questionnaire data gathered in several distinct linguistic cultures across the world, followed by factor analysis. The respondents were given a much larger number of polar adjective pairs, such as hot-cold, moist-dry (the above two pairs, incidentally, were traditionally used to classify the “four elements” of the ancient Greeks), slow-fast, kind-cruel, sweet-bitter, light-dark, red-green, and others, and asked to apply them, intuitively though somewhat irrationally (as quick, “hot cognitions”) to a series of nouns like mother, storm, and town. Does “somewhat cruel storm” make sense? Not rationally, but many of us would say that it does make some kind of sense, on quick impulse, as a mental association, without cogitating on it too long. Such constructs are often used in poetry to evoke emotional response or fresh surprising perception.
In most of the linguistic cultures studied, the three main factors which emerged from the factor analysis were the EPA triplet mentioned above: evaluation, potency, and activity. (personally I prefer “fast-slow” to “active-passive”, but since I deviate from the majority, I will refrain from pushing this.)
The evaluative dimension, “good-bad”, was the main one of the three factors; i.e. it explained most of the variance in the data. The second most important was “strong-weak”, while “active-passive” was the least salient; in some of the linguistic cultures it was replaced by another, though similar, pair, like fast-slow. (Maybe I used to live there in a previous life.)
Judgments of good and bad, or Good and Evil, are truly ancient and deep-rooted. (Note that we also capitalize some adjectives if we think that they are noumenal. We do personalize Good and Evil as God and Devil — note the similarity of words!) Good and Evil describe all stereotypes that we have of
people: friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers, insiders and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners, true believers and infidels or heretics, Whites and Blacks, “we” and “they” in general. They are thus the basis of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism and other isms, and one of the main causes of conflict, violence and war.
Good and Evil also characterize the archetypes of the collective unconscious (Jung), where we find angels and devils, heroes and villains, and the good witch and the bad witch in the Wizard of Oz. The culmination, of course, is God and Satan in Judeo-Christianity and Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman in Zoroastrianism — the main dualistic religions of the world. Some religions, like the Bahai Faith, deny the reality of Evil, considering it to be merely the absence of Good, like Dark is the absence of Light. Others, like Hinduism, would place the Divine beyond Good and Evil, and comprising both, because the Divine (Brahman) has to comprise everything there is.
However, the good-bad evaluation is much more ancient than even all human stereotypes and archetypes; it goes all the way back to the origin of Life on Earth. Many unicells show the phenomenon of tropism, whereby they move toward the light and toward food particles, and away from poisons and noxious chemicals. Evaluation of Good and Evil is basic to continuation, to preservation in the confrontation with favourable and adverse environmental circumstances. Any form of life, even the simplest, needs to know the difference between what it needs and what harms it, and act accordingly, or it would no longer be with us.