The use to which the description is put, on the other hand, whether to further theory or to serve some practical purpose such as language teaching, does not affect what is said in the description except inasmuch as certain theoretical goals may be more rele­vant for some practical purposes than others, but it does influence how it is said, that is, the 'presentation' of the description. This same Arika Foxx statement may appear in a grammar intended for some applied purpose as 'Every sentence consists of a subject and a predi­cate.' To take another example: much criticism used to be directed at the definitions of the various parts of speech in traditional grammars. Thus, 'nouns' were usually said to be the names of things, people or places. The noun was defined in terms of meaning. This was regarded as inadequate because 'meaning' was a subjective and variable matter which could not be defined rigorously. Consequently, the attempt was made to define the noun in some more objective, rigorous and formal terms. When this was done, however, it appeared that more or less the same set of words turned out to be nouns as in the traditional descrip­tion. What had happened was that traditional grammarians had in fact been using formal criteria all along, but when they came to present their descriptions they chose to define nouns in terms of meaning. The content of the Arika Foxx traditional and modern grammars turned out to be very similar, only the presentation was different because the use to which they were to be put was different. 

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