Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
191 
appears (But compare “apple-eatings”). On the other hand a 
virtual verbal time-inflection may appear, as in “having eaten” 
and “being about to eat.” Even voice-inflection is a possibil¬ 
ity, as in “Being eaten by cannibals must be disagreeable.” 
This form of verbal-noun continually reverts to the construc¬ 
tions indicated in (2), as in “apple-eating,” “The eating of 
apples” and “Bobinson’s eating of apples.” 
(6) The infinitive. This also as a rule foregoes all substantive 
inflection, except what may occasionally be offered by the de¬ 
graded article, as in “Er widmet sich dem Wein trinken.” As 
a verb it usually operates, in dealing with its subject and its 
object, like the solely verbal forms, except for the common ap¬ 
pearance of its subject in the accusative form (Compare pages 
157-163) which may be regarded as the business of that sub¬ 
ject, rather than that of the infinitive. Time and voice it 
expresses adequately, though not attempting the associational 
person-number inflection except in the case of 
(7) The Portuguese infinitive. To this, in certain cases, 
the person-number inflectional endings of the subjunctive are 
attached. This interesting form, exhibiting the recognizedly 
substantive infinitive, with a part of the inflectional peculiar¬ 
ity which constitutes the essential ground for differentiating 
the substantive subjunctive from the infinitive, forms a sug¬ 
gestive connecting link between (6) and 
(8) The subjunctive in substantive function. That this is 
felt to be, in one of its functions, at least a part of a noun, is 
indicated by the fact that in Spanish, etc., the clause in which 
it stands is frequently preceded not only by the substantive- 
clause sign “que” (Latin “quod”), but at the same time also 
by the article. The history of the sometimes so-called sen¬ 
tence-article “that” and its Teutonic collaterals, and the sug¬ 
gestion offered by the Anglo-Saxon “for thy thaet,” etc., con¬ 
firm the thoroughly substantive function of what I have striven 
to exhibit as rather the nucleary—in this case the verbal— 
element of the lateral clause, than the clause regarded as a 
totaL Accordingly, in a sentence containing a substantive 
subjunctive clause, I diagram construction as follows: 
