HUMAN SPEECH 61 



ments may be characterized as relational ; they not merely serve to give 

 the word affected a new increment of meaning, as is the case with the 

 first group, but also assign it a definite syntactic place in the sentence, 

 defining as they do its relation to other words of the sentence. Such 

 a relational grammatical element, in English, is the plural -s suffix; 

 a word, for instance, like books differs from its corresponding singular 

 book not merely in the idea of plurality conveyed by the suffix -s, but 

 assumes a different grammatical relation to other words in the sentence 

 — a book is, but books are. Such relational elements are, furthermore, 

 the case and gender suffixes of nouns and adjectives in Indogermanic 

 languages; furthermore, the personal endings and tense suffixes of 

 verbs. On the whole it may be said that derivational elements are of 

 relatively more concrete signification than the relational ones and tend 

 to become more thoroughly welded into a word unit with the basic word 

 or stem to which they are attached or which they affect. This state- 

 ment, however, is only approximately of general application and is sub- 

 ject to numerous qualifications. The greatest degree of concreteness 

 of meaning conveyed by derivational elements is probably attained in 

 many, though by no means all, American Indian languages, where ideas 

 of largely material content are apt to be expressed by grammatical 

 means. To this tendency the name of polysynthesis has been applied. 

 Thus in Yana, an Indian language of northern California, such ideas 

 as up a hill, across a creek, in the fire, to the east, from the south, 

 immediately, in vain and a host of others are expressed by means of 

 grammatical suffixes appended to the verb stem; so also in Nootka, an 

 Indian language of Vancouver Island, so highly special ideas as on the 

 head, in the hand, on the rocks, on the surface of the water, and many 

 others, are similarly expressed as suffixes. It is important to note that, 

 although the distinction between derivational and relational grammat- 

 ical elements we have made is clearly reflected in some way or other in 

 most languages, they differ a great deal as to what particular logical 

 concepts are treated as respectively derivational or relational. Such 

 concepts as those of sex gender, number and tense, which in Indo- 

 germanic are expressed as relational elements, are in other linguistic 

 stocks hardly to be separated, as regards their grammatical treatment, 

 from concepts treated in a clearly derivational manner. On the other 

 hand, demonstrative ideas, which in most Indogermanic languages 

 receive no relational syntactic treatment, may, as in the Kwakiutl 

 language of British Columbia, serve an important relational function, 

 analogous, say, to the Indogermanic use of gender; just as in Latin, 

 for instance, such a sentence as " I saw the big house " is expressed by 

 " I-saw house-masculine-objective big-masculine-objective," with a 

 necessary double reference to the concepts of case relation and gender, 

 so in Kwakiutl the sentence " I saw the house " would have to be ex- 



