580 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



between denominating and predicating terms; that is, between sub- 

 ject and predicate, or, roughly speakmg, between substantive and 

 verb. This does not necessarily imply that we have in all cases to 

 deal with an actual difference in phonetic form between noun and 

 verb, though as a matter of fact such differences are generally found, 

 but simply that the structure of the sentence is such as to show clearly 

 that one member of it is felt by the speaker and hearer to have a purely 

 denominating office, another a purely predicating one. It may be 

 objected that in Chinese, for instance, there is no formal distinction 

 made between noun and verb. True, but the logical distinction of 

 subject and predicate is reflected in the form of the Chinese sentence, 

 inasmuch as the subject regularly precedes the predicate; thus, 

 while the same word may be either noun or verb, in any particular 

 sentence it necessarily is definitely one and not the other. Other 

 fundamental logical categories will, on a more complete survey, be 

 found to be subject to grammatical treatment in all or nearly all 

 languages, but this is not the place to be anything but merely 

 suggestive. Suffice it to remark on the widespread systematizing 

 of personal relations; the widespread development of ideas of tense, 

 number, and syntactic case relations; and the clear grammatical 

 expression everywhere or nearly everywhere given to the largely 

 emotional distinction of declarative, interrogative, and imperative 

 modes. 



Granted that there are certain general fundamental traits of simi- 

 larity in all known languages, the problem arises of how to explain 

 these similarities. Are they to be explained historically, as sur- 

 vivals of features deep-rooted in an earliest form of human speech 

 that, despite the enormous differentiation of language that the lapse 

 of ages has wrought, have held theh* own to the present day, or are 

 they to be explained psychologically as due to the existence of inherent 

 human mental characteristics that abide regardless of time and pace ? 

 If the latter standpoint be preferred, we should be dealing with a 

 phenomenon of parallel development. It is of course impossible to 

 decide categorically between the two explanations that have been 

 offered, though doubtless the majority of students would incline to 

 the psychological rather than to the historical method. At any 

 rate, it is clear that we can not strictly infer a monogenetic theory 

 of speech from the fundamental traits of similarity that all forms of 

 speech exhibit. Yet even though these are of psychologic rather 

 than historic interest, it is important to have demonstrated the 

 existence of a common psychological substratum, or perhaps we had 

 better say framework, which is more or less clearly evident in aU 

 languages. This very substratum or framework gives the scientific 

 study of language a coherence and unity quite regardless of any con- 

 siderations of genetic relationship of languages. 



