Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
113 
ACTUAL HYBRIDS. 
Of possible hybrids, only a few occur in actual linguistic 
practice. 
Some of the reputed parts of speech express ideas whose 
membership in thought is the same as that of ideas expressed 
by other parts of speech. Tor instance, the idea expressed by 
tffe article takes, in the structure of thought, a position nowise 
different from that of the idea expressed by an adjective, and 
the article may as well be ranked as an adjective of merely 
debilitated 7 meaning. 
Words traditionally ranked as pronouns, I have elsewhere 
sought to exhibit as sometimes merely somewhat peculiar nouns, 
sometimes (when relative) virtual case-endings, sometimes 
(when interrogative) sentences complete. 
Of the conjunction I can at this point only state my individ¬ 
ual impression, that careful examination would fail to show in 
its operation any peculiarity which is not exhibited by one 
or another of the parts of speech examined below, by a dupli¬ 
cation or by a combination thereof, the conjunction in the last 
case being also a hybrid. In short, I cannot distinguish a con¬ 
junctional word-class so different from others in its operation, 
as to warrant special recognition. 
The interjection is more or less consciously felt by language- 
students to be extra-sentential—in the sentence, but not of it— 
accordingly, not a part of speech, at least in the restricted 
sense of “satz-theil.” 
The participle is perceived, though not so universally as 
might be wished, to be a verbal adjective—that is, itself a hy¬ 
brid. 
The preposition (further interrogated in the note on p. 149), 
like the verb, exhibits a relation between a pair of terms. This 
relation, however, is always secondary, never to my knowledge 
reaching that prominence which is corollary to a double mem¬ 
bership of thought. Accordingly, intending to make the prep- 
7 So much so as to be incapacitated for service in the important 
predicate position. 
