O’Shea—The Child’s Linguistic Development. 199 
has abandoned his primordial sentence-words, and in their place 
he nses sentences with substantive, predicate, and modifiers, so 
that any one word now carries special, differentiated meaning. 
When S. at four says: “I throw it toward the house,” he shows 
that he has reached the prepositional plane, so to speak, in 
linguistic development. It may be added that the principle here 
in question applies to development in respect of all the parts 
of speech. To illustrate with our adjective nice, already often 
cited, this is first used as a sentence-word; but a term like virtu¬ 
ous is never employed until the sentence-word period is out¬ 
grown, and the word carries adjectival meaning alone. 
It will not be necessary to dwell long upon the proposition 
that conjunctions as such appear relatively late in the child's 
language. It is probable that the primitive sentence-word car¬ 
ries conjunctional function, but to a very limited extent, I should 
say. It is questionable whether the thought of a child of two 
is integrated to the degree required for the intelligent use of 
the conjunction. The central processes relating to any situation 
are, relatively speaking, fragmentary, disjointed; or better still, 
unconnected, or non-integrated. Now, development results in 
the gradual integration of elementary processes, and this makes 
necessary the use of the conjunction in expression. Probably 
the earliest sort of integration has reference to objects acting 
simultaneously in the same way. In the beginning the child 
will say, “Baby-go-stairs” (Baby is going upstairs) ; “papa- 
go-stairs” (papa is going upstairs). But before the completion 
of the second year, one may hear this expression, “Baby a papa 
going upstairs.” This example is typical of much that may 
be heard as early as the twenty-fourth month. Judging from 
my own observations I should say that objects acting simultane¬ 
ously and congruently are coordinated considerably earlier than 
are the acts they perform, or the qualities predicated of them. 
One may hear children after the third year say, “My run and 
fall and get up again,” and “Mamma nice and good,” and the 
like; but such expressions appear later than the first type men¬ 
tioned. It is probable that two objects acting in the same way 
fuse in the child’s thought more readily than succeeding actions 
or co-existent qualities of the same object. Baby and papa, go- 
