O'Shea—The Child's Linguistic Development. 183 
which attracts her. She does not of course abstract the action 
from the object and regard it as a thing apart; but she is affected 
differently by the object when it is at rest from what she is when 
it is in motion. The conception of action as such arises only very 
gradually as a generalization upon a body of experiences, where¬ 
in particular objects are seen to be capable of a variety of 
actions. This results in establishing the feeling that there is a 
something constituting an object which is not displayed in its 
particular activities. In some such way object, action, quality 
are differentiated; and our analytic language aids in the differ¬ 
entiation, and tends to make it permanent. The effort to employ 
differentiated speech imitatively is a great stimulus to the defini¬ 
tion of elements in one’s original undifferentiated ideas. 
2. NOMINAL AND VERBAL FUNCTION IN EARLY SPEECH. 
It is probable, as I have intimated, that the child’s early in¬ 
terests center entirely in things as qualitative and dynamic; and, 
confining our attention here to the development of nominal and 
verbal function, we see that it is only upon a multiplicity of ex¬ 
periences that the child can conceive of any object as distinct 
from its various dynamic conditions. So that in the young 
child’s consciousness noun and verb, viewing the matter func¬ 
tionally, cannot exist independently; the use of substantive 
terms, speaking grammatically, always implies predicative char¬ 
acteristics. When the child makes his own terms they always 
denote objects acting; just as do individual terms in primitive 
languages. Only in our anayltic adult language, which has 
been developed to express intricate and highly differentiated in¬ 
tellectual content—only in this Language are substantive and 
predicate function more or less completely differentiated. Now, 
when the child copies the forms of this highly differentiated lan¬ 
guage, we may argue that he must have back of them the same 
differentiated thought as the adult has, but in this assumption 
we are quite likely to go wide of the mark. 
In illustration of this point, take a case like the following. I 
give K. the term 4 ‘ runs ’ ’ for her brother cutting across the lawr 
I repeat it on several occasions, and I find that soon she will 
