Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/66

62 by some such sentence as "I-saw-the-objective-near-you house-visible-near-you," with an analogous necessary double reference to the demonstrative relations involved. If, now, it has been shown that no necessary correlation exists between particular logical concepts and the formal method of their grammatical rendering, and if, furthermore, there can not even be shown to be a hard and fast line in grammatical treatment between concepts of a derivational and concepts of a more definitely relational character, what becomes of the logical category per se as a criterion of linguistic classification on the basis of form? Evidently it fails us. Of however great psychological interest it might be to map out the distribution in various linguistic stocks of logical concepts receiving formal treatment, it is clear that no satisfactory formal classification of linguistic types would result from such a mapping.

Having thus disposed of the subject-matter of linguistic morphology as a classificatory criterion, there is left to us the form pure and simple. Here we are confronted first of all by a number of formal grammatical methods or processes. These, being less numerous than the logical categories which they express themselves, and, furthermore, being on the whole more easily defined and recognized, would seem to lend themselves more easily to classificatory purposes. The simplest grammatical process is the juxtaposing of words in a definite order, a method made use of to perhaps the greatest extent by Chinese, to a very large extent also by English; the possibilities of the process from the point of view of grammatical effectiveness may be illustrated by comparing such an English sentence as "The man killed the bear" with "The bear killed the man," the actual words and forms being identical in the two sentences, yet definite case relations being clearly expressed in both. A somewhat similar process, yet easily enough kept apart, is compounding, that is, the fusion of two words or independent stems, into a firm word-unit; the process is particularly well developed in English, as illustrated by words like railroad and underestimate, and indeed is found widely spread among the most diverse linguistic stocks. In some languages, as in the Sioux and Paiute of our own country, compounding of verb stems is frequent, as illustrated by such forms as to eat-stand, that is to eat while standing; on the other hand, in not a few linguistic stocks, as the wide-spread Athabascan stock of North America and the Semitic languages, compounding as a regular process is almost or entirely lacking. Perhaps the most commonly used formal method of all is affixing, that is, the appending of grammatical elements to a word or to the body or stem of a word; the two most common varieties of affixing are prefixing and suffixing, examples of which have been already given from English. Probably the majority of linguistic stocks make use of both prefixes and suffixes, though