In “proper” nominalization a nominalized form represents qualities and processes as “abstracted” from things and time respectively. We can talk of orders and entities in terms of existence in space, and existence in time. First-order entities/things are temporarily unbounded and exist bounded in space, second-order entities/processes are temporarily bounded and exist in time, and third-order entities/abstractions are unbounded and have existence in neither.
Nominalizations properly refer to third-order entities, e.g. “Cooking involves irreversible chemical changes”, in which cooking refers to he process as a generic type, abstracted from a particular token instance at a specific time. A second kind of nominalization involves reference to second-order entities. Here reference is to particular countable tokens of processes, e.g. “The cooking took five hours”. The third kind of nominalization has been called improper (Vendler, 1968). This refers to first-order entities, things with physical substance and often extended in space, e.g. “I like John’s cooking”, which refers to the food which results from the cooking, (the RESULT OF ACTION AS ACTION metonymy).
Help me to summarize its main idea which is selected from Washing the Brain----Metaphor and Hidden?
Responses (1)
"If you can't explain what you know so a bar maid understands it, you don't know it."
~ Albert Einstein
Your question has a large number of multisyllabic words, and that always indicates that the speaker either does not understand the subject or is trying to sound like his subject is more important than it really is.
"In naming things, you describe qualities and processes apart from things and time." Your quote does not have such a clear meaning. When you point out the lack of meaning to speakers, they go totally bonkers and start yelling insults at you, because you have exposed their attempts to act like they know something when they don't.
This example is somewhat better than the usual case because the author actually uses plain language examples to illustrate his big words. But he still does not explain why anyone should be concerned about such philosophies. The only effect of this piece is to give philosophers another code phrase, "third order nominalization", which they can use to sound like they are members of some group where people talk that way.
If you want to actually learn something, such as what 'metonomy' means, get this free ebook that lists about 900 figures of speech found in the bible. It is almost the only work in the subject for the last two thousand years:
www.openlibrary.org/search?q=e.+w.+bullinger+figures+of+speech
Thank you for your advice