FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 5 



The latter is a personal influence acting upon individuals and not 

 upon the body of speakers as a whole. 



This practically universal disposition towards economy of utterance 

 has been one though doubtless not the principal one of the 

 agencies which have contributed to the development and diffusion of 

 the sign language. In a rudimentary form this prevails everywhere. 

 We see it exemplified daily in numerous gestures in which the move- 

 ment of some part of the body indicates to the eye what the lips 

 neglect to put into words. But what concerns us here specifically is 

 the effect of this disposition upon the structure of the sentence. No 

 small number of the rules laid down in our grammars are for the pur- 

 pose of meeting the requirements of the situation produced by the 

 desire of the users of speech to express what they have to say with 

 the least expenditure of effort. Take as one illustration out of many 

 the grammatical construction called apposition. It is called into 

 being for no other purpose than to explain a practice of omitting 

 words for the sake of economy of utterance, which has established 

 itself so generally that it has come to seem normal. Hence we never 

 take into account the fact that it denotes nothing more than the 

 abridgment of a complete dependent phrase. This is but a single fact 

 out of the multitude of facts of this sort which the student of the 

 grammar of every tongue meets on every side. In going through the 

 process we call parsing we are constantly under the necessity of 

 declaring some word to be understood. Its presence is not required 

 for comprehension; but grammar requires it for the explanation of 

 the construction. Language abounds in these short cuts to expres- 

 sion. Every tongue has peculiarities of its own in this respect which 

 other tongues, at least some other tongues, will not tolerate at all. 

 We have a striking illustration of this in English in the constant 

 omission of the relative. In such a sentence as "The man you saw 

 yesterday came to-day," no one, whether speaking or hearing, feels 

 the absence of the pronoun. It is only when we set out to analyze the 

 sentence grammatically that we recognize the need of dragging into 

 light the suppressed relative. This is a usage to which many languages 

 cannot resort ; but there is probably not a language on the globe in 

 which a single word is not made to do often the duty of a whole sen- 

 tence. 



But there is another side of the shield. We find a force at work 

 which impels men not to economize effort, but to put it forth in pro- 

 fusion. They are not content with the fewest words or abridged con- 

 structions in order to make themselves understood. They amplify, 

 they vary, they employ expressions which abstractly may seem 

 unnecessary. Here again I am not referring to the expansion of the 

 thought in the way of adorning it or illustrating it, which belongs to 

 the domain of rhetoric and not of linguistics proper. But the reason 



