612 GRAMMAR OF THE KLAMATH LANGUAGE. 



tlie exception of that by which a cliange of radix is brougj/t about in the 

 intransitive verb. Had number been of great value to the native mind, it 

 would have been expressed by the same granmiatic form throughout. This 

 was done, however, concerning the category of severalty, for which only 

 one form exists, though this one form is applied in many different ways. 

 This feature is the distributive syllaljic reduplication; it pervades the whole 

 language, down to the postposition and some adverbial particles. The same 

 grammatic form which in Pima, Opata, and other Nahua languages expresses 

 a plural, reappears here, in the Seli.sh and Malayo-Polynesian dialects, as 

 pointing to severalty or distribution, sometimes involving the idea of cus- 

 tom, frequency, repetition, or that of a gradual process. In the verbs of 

 the Arjan family, it once fulfilled the function of marking a preterit tense. 



Whenever we see intransitive and objective-transitive verbs used in the 

 distributive form, we naturally expect that the subjects of the former and 

 the direct objects of the latter should assume the same form. But the Indian 

 does not always apply our Aryan ideas of syntactic congruence to his own 

 speech; his syntactic views are rather of the incorporative order, and what 

 is expressed by one part of a sentence applies to the whole sentence, for it 

 is needless to repeat a grammatic fact previously stated. Thus the idea of 

 severalty, and also that of plurality, when pointed out by the verb, will 

 hold good for the governing or governed noun also, and needs no repetition. 

 When adjectives are joined attributively to substantives or pronouns, the 

 same incorporative principle applies to the case-forms and the distributive 

 forms, as shown in Morphology. But there are some other reasons of a 

 more stringent nature which, at times, prevent the use of the distributive 

 forms in one of the syntactic components. They are as follows: 



When the verb of the sentence is an intransitive verb, showing the dis- 

 ti'ibutive form, its subject will usually show the same form when animate, 

 and the absolute form when inanimate; but when the verb is transitive and 

 shows the distributive form, the object will stand in the absolute form if 

 only one object has been acted upon, or if the object is a collective noun, 

 and in the distributive if each object has been acted upon separately. 

 But when there are many subjects acting all at once, we have to expect the 

 subject either in the plural or in the distributive form and the verb in the 



