THE ATTKIBUTIYE HELATION. 629 



in the direction of the attribute. The attributive relation is a relation quali- 

 fying either the verb or the noun. The verb may become qualified or 

 determined by an adverb, an adverbial phrase or locution, or an adverbial 

 clause containing a finite verb. The noun, generally the substantive only, 

 may be determined by some attributive, so-called adnominal term ; this 

 may be either an appositive noun or a qualifying noun (added to it in the 

 possessive or partitive case), an adjective (qualitative or numeral), or a 

 pronoun. 



The compounding of words and the extent to which it is carried on forms 

 an impoi'tant chapter in every language. I have omitted it in the Mor- 

 phology in order to treat more fully of it in Syntax, and in fact this lin- 

 guistic feature belongs rather to the syntactic than to the morphologic part 

 of gramnaar, for it finds its true position in the chapter on the attributive 

 relation. Under the term of vt'ord-composition I comprehend the compound 

 verbs and compound nouns only, excluding all the other ways of word- 

 compounding, as the poly synthesis of formative affixes, otherwise called 

 derivation ; the incorporative process, etc. 



Word-composition is a process of synthesis which is of greater gram- 

 matic importance than it would seem at first to be. We have first to 

 observe carefully which one of the terms, the qualifying or the qualified 

 one, stands before the other, for this gives us an insight into the logical facul- 

 ties of the people speaking the language. Usually the qualifying term has 

 the precedence, because it is considered more important for the understand- 

 ing of the whole sentence. The location of the rhetoric accent upon the 

 first or the second part of the compound is not without signification, and 

 the combination of the two elements into a new word with a curious or 

 unexpected definition is at times of great ethnographic and psychologic 

 importance. The compounding may be effected in two ways, whether 

 there are two, three, or more elements to be combined into one : («) by 

 (if/fflutination, viz., by connecting the elements without any or without im- 

 portant phonetic alteration, the parts retaining their usual accentuation ; 

 (h) by fusion, viz., by an intimate, thorough connection of the elements 

 to form a new term, attended by the loss of accentuation on one side and 

 an occasional entire change of signification, as well as a loss of phonetic 



