O’Shea—The Child’s Linguistic Development . 189 
3. INTERACTIONAL i FUNCTION IN EARLY SPEECH. 
Thus far I have spoken only of nominal and verbal function in 
the child's earliest sentence-making. Perhaps I should have be¬ 
gun with the interjection, since this, viewed from one standpoint, 
is the first part of speech to appear. It may be observed, how¬ 
ever, that Meiklejohn * 2 and others say the interjection is no real 
part of language, since it does not enter into the organism of the 
sentence. But the observers of infantile linguistics have re¬ 
tained the interjection as a part of speech; and, according to 
Tracy’s Summary, the vocabulary of the average child of about 
two years contains less than two per cent of interjections. 
Salisbury 3 maintains that in the vocabulary of his child at 
thirty-two months there were only five interjections out of a total 
of six hundred forty-two vmrds. At five and one-half years 
there was but one interjection out of a total of fifteen hundred 
twenty-eight words. The table given by Kirpatrick 4 shows 
about the same prenomenon as Salisbury’s. Now, these classifica¬ 
tions are made strictly ah extra, following the formal grammati¬ 
cal categories. But, regarding the matter psychologically, there 
is an interjection element in most of the child’s early words, as 
Mrs. Hall 5 appears to have observed. She maintains that the 
language of her child from the two hundred thirty-third to the 
three hundred fourteenth day was an “ interjectional onomato- 
poetic race-language. ’ ’ 
1 may illustrate the point in question by citing B’s use of 
Kee (kitty). Whenever he uttered it, in the beginning, there 
was always something of the “Oh!” quality about it. The kit¬ 
ten was for some weeks a fresh surprise every time he beheld it, 
and he used his word with much feeling. He might with pro- 
il do not here distinguish between inter jectional and exclamatory 
function, though in strict grammatical treatment this should doubtless 
be done. Professor Owen makes this distinction. The' interjection is 
a sentence element, though it is not strictly a part of the sentence. 
The exclamation may be expressionally self sufficient. 
2 See his English Language, Part I, p. 60. 
s Educational Review, Vol. VII, pp. 287-290. 
4 See his The Fundamentals of Child Study, p. 236. 
5 Op. cit. p. 601. 
