4 NOUNS AND VERBS: OBJECTS AND EVENTS

A virus is spreading. With pronouns, we can refer to persons and objects, but we cannot yet say anything about them. To make important statements such as the italicized one, we need nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. With pronouns alone, we could talk about a virus as it, but we couldn't qualify it more precisely as a virus, or as a dangerous virus, let alone say what it does— namely, that it is spreading or spreading rapidly. We convey information about things by classifying them in terms of what they are and what they do. To take this further step, we first need nouns and verbs. These characterize entire sets of objects and entire sets of events. Thus, I am a man states that I belong to the set of men, while I am reading asserts that I take part in an event belonging to the set of reading events; similarly for SARS-CoV-2 is a virus or SARS-CoV-2 is spreading. In effect, verbs are just like nouns, but they characterize different kinds of things: events, not objects.