Figure 5. Abstractness of boundary types
The types of boundaries schematized in figure 5 represent three types of nominal boundaries: a count, b mass, and c abstract. See section 4.2.2 for further discussion of
nominalization from a cognitive viewpoint. One of the crucial aspects of understanding the approach in this study is to recognize
the role of conceiving of diverse parts as a whole unit—that is, framing, bounding, unitizing, reifying, substantivizing a series of elements in a linguistically that is, grammatically
realized or finalized sense. This process is here called
NOMINALIZATION
.
1.3.2.3 Ontological Nominals
A separate type of ontology for linguistic categories is proposed here as a form of linguistic objects
8
that arise out of the grammar by the abstraction of the linguist. One might ask, “In what sense does a noun exist?” “In what sense does grammar exist?” “What kind of
ontological status does the noun noun possess?” The answer to these questions establishes the basis for distinguishing whether there are two types of nominals. Depending on one’s
philosophical view of language the answer could be a a noun is a physical object American structuralism, or b mental knowledge that exists in the speaker’s concepts conceptualists,
or c it exists as an abstract theoretical entity realists, or d the noun only exists as social behavior sociolinguists and systemicists.
Moderately adopting a realist position for grammar, it is assumed in this work that the existence of a noun is as an abstract entity in a grammatical system that is derived by
abstraction from physical world data—language as a physical, psychological, and social entity. It is not assumed that the analytical categories have any physical world existence,
either as a mind or brain state, or that they exist as a Platonic ideal. Rather the existence of the linguistic category noun is assumed to have some sort of psychological and social “reality” in
the sense that it can be tested indirectly and that it can be verified to some degree, or falsified should that be the preferable philosophy of science. The approach for theory development is
quasi realist and quasi conceptualist, which is probably more cognitivist. It is assumed that conceptual structures or processes of some sort are used by native speakers when producing
grammatical utterances, but how linguists model them is not “what they are” actually. It is assumed that some models are better than others and that the better model is the one that
represents the data the most naturally, with the least “foreignness.”
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The term “object” is used in a wide sense, as it can encompass qualities, relations, actions, events, processes, spatial or temporal aspects, mental acts or states, andor all of the above, or only parts of them, or some mixture
of the same.
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. Kuhn
1970:76
If grammatical nominalization is an abstract entity then the ontological nominal is as well. Nominalization is a process that is both grammatical in the traditional sense
derivational morphology and nominalized noun phrases and clauses but is also supra- grammatical in Burmese and manifest by another process of nominalization in which
grammatical nominals are collected as constituents of higher, more abstract nominal units that function in the sentence and text as arguments, adjuncts, or other types of constituents of the
discourse. In particular, the structures generated by the role of postpositional particles are abstract units of the text which also have a linguistic ontological status. That is, they can be
questioned and answered as units by native speakers. They can be moved about or transformed in information restructuring. They exist as textual objects and provide regular
organization to the grammar. These abstract units are called
ONTOLOGICAL NOMINALS
.
1.3.3 Systematic Summary of Conceptual Dimensions
