188 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters . 
ally expressed, when needed, by verbal nouns of the “expurga¬ 
tion” type. The ideas expressible by case-inflection are usu¬ 
ally rendered by one or another preposition, or an inflected ar¬ 
ticle—or both, though also inflectionally expressed with con¬ 
siderable fullness by the Latin gerund, and to some extent by 
the supine. 
Of instructional inflection, be it substantive or verbal, the 
amount employed, varies with the varying need of structure- 
exhibition, which it will be advantageous to examine later. 
It is most convenient to exhibit the inflectional varieties 51 of 
the verbal noun as forming at the same time a diminuendo 
series, viewed as nouns—and a crescendo series, viewed as 
verbs; accordingly: 
(1) The noun with merely verb-like meaning. 
To illustrate, “Murder is a sin.” The distinction between 
this and the following class of nouns (which take an object or 
a subject or the one and the other) is difficult and hardly nec¬ 
essary. In my illustration “Murder” may be held by some to 
be a quasi-synonym of “Killing a man.” To such the con¬ 
struction of thought is the counterpart of a genuine verbal noun 
syntax. Whether such a syntax really be detectable or in¬ 
tended in my illustration—whether accordingly such a word 
should rather rank as a verbal noun of the following class— 
whether it should be rejected as not at all a verbal noun—may 
be left unsettled. 
Again, in “The Lincoln murder,” some may employ “Lin¬ 
coln” as a virtual adjective 52 to “murder”, while others may use 
the latter word in the sense of “murdering”, with “Lincoln” as 
its object. The “Booth Lincoln murder” may intend that 
“Booth” (like “Booth’s”) be taken as a virtual subject, or may 
employ “Booth” as an adjective, leaving it open whether “Lin- 
Of these, the following exhibition makes no claim to be complete, 
nor is completeness vital to mere illustration of method. 
»2 Instead of meaning “characterized by one or more of Lincoln’s 
Qualities”, the adjectively employed word would in such case mean 
“distinguished by Lincoln’s implication (known to be objective).” 
