62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pressed 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 morphol- 

 ogy 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 gram- 

 matical 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 major- 

 ity of linguistic stocks make use of both prefixes and suffixes, though 



