592 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN" INSTITUTION, 1912. 



grammatical consonant changes pla^^ a very important part. As the 

 last formal grammatical process of importance may be mentioned 

 accent, and here we have to distinguish between stress accent and 

 musical or pitch accent. An excellent example of the grammatical 

 use of stress accent is afforded in English by such pairs of words as 

 conflict and conflict, object and object, the verb being accented on the 

 second syllable, the noun on the first. Musical accent is a far more 

 prevalent phonetic characteristic than is perhaps generally supposed; 

 it is by no means confined to Chinese and neighboring languages of 

 eastern Asia, but is found just as well in many languages of Africa 

 and, as has been recently discovered by Mr. J. P. Harrington and the 

 \vriter, in a few North American Indian languages. As a process of 

 definite grammatical significance, however, musical accent is not so 

 widespread. It is found, to give but one example, m the earlier 

 stages of Indogermanic, as exemplified, among others, by classical 

 Greek and by Lithuanian. 



Having thus briefly reviewed the various grammatical processes 

 used by different languages, we may ask ourselves whether the 

 mapping out of the distribution of these processes would be of more 

 service to us in our quest of the main tjrpes of language than we have 

 found the grammatical treatment of logical concepts to be. Here a 

 difficulty presents itself. If each linguistic stock were characterized 

 by the use of just one or almost entirely one formal process, it would 

 not be difficult to classify all languages rather satisfactorily on the 

 basis of form. But there are great differences in this respect. A 

 minority of linguistic stocks content themselves with a consistent 

 and thoroughgoing use of one process, as does Eskimo with its suffix- 

 ing of grammatical elements, but by far the larger number make use 

 of so many that their classification becomes difficult, not to say 

 arbitrary. Thus in Greek alone every one of the processes named 

 above, excepting consonant change, can be exemplified. Even if we 

 limit ourselves to a consideration of grammatical processes employed 

 to express the relational concepts, we shall find the same difficulty, 

 for the same language not infrequently makes use of several distinct 

 processes for concepts of this class. 



On a closer study of linguistic morphology, however, we find that 

 it is possible to look at the matter of form in language from a different, 

 at the same time more generalized, point of view than from that of 

 the formal processes employed themselves. This new point of view 

 has regard to the inner coherence of the words produced by the opera- 

 tion of the various grammatical processes; in other words, to the 

 relative degree of unity which the stem or unmodified word plus its 

 various grammatical increments or modifications possesses, emphasis 

 being particularly laid on the degree of unity which the grammatical 

 processes bring about between the stem and the increments which 



