Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
183 
pre-linguistic planning of the total, I doubtless foresaw collect¬ 
ively as first and last terms of the third, and even as blended 
wholes; and thus no doubt I also sense them in any final or 
intermediary perspective survey. But the collective or blended 
view which is taken—be it prevision or revision—is not sug¬ 
gested by my sentence. In a well inflected language you will 
find indeed sufficient indications that “I” is subject of “used”, 
and “feet” its object; that “I”, “could” and “fly” are in sim¬ 
ilar fellowship; that “my” is adjunctive to “feet”, while “not” 
has a similar bearing on “could”; and that “could” is not only 
verb to “I” and “fly”, but also, as a noun, the object 46 of “be¬ 
cause”. This however, as I imagine, is all that you find. You 
find no indication that, in major thought-construction, minor 
thoughts are used collectively—nothing to embarrass their rec¬ 
ognition as nucleary factors attended by their fellow terms. 
As I shall later argue, the choice of nucleary factor varies, 
for different excellent reasons. But when the speaker is in¬ 
fluenced merely by the practical difficulty of sensing collectively 
what in thought-construction lie would like to use collectively, 
that choice is found to fall, with conspicuous regularity, upon 
the verbal, or say the relational element. Thus, in “I rarely 
lose my temper” (see page 178), while predinguistically con¬ 
ceiving the idea expressed by “rarely” as bearing on a total 
thought, but electing in linguistic thinking to exhibit that idea 
as bearing on a nucleary element itself attended by other ele¬ 
ments, I select as nucleary the idea of losing. So also, if you 
asked me what I was talking about, with all existing proneness 
to make myself the center of the universe, I should not answer 
“myself implicated in a loss of temper,” nor 
“a temper implicated in my losing,” but rather 
“a loss, in which self and temper were implicated”— 
a choice in which the major importance of the relation (for 
man is distinctively a relation-finder), or the conspicuousness of 
the action which develops relation, may be regarded as the de- 
46 Such interpretation will, be defended in a section devoted to the 
subjunctive. Meantime it appears more plausibly in the infinitive il¬ 
lustration “por no poder yo volar” (by reason of I not to be able to 
fly). 
