Is indefinite as to aspect, "be crying" is durative, "cry put" is

momentaneous, "burst into tears" is inceptive, "keep crying" is

continuative, "start in crying" is durative-inceptive, "cry now and

again" is iterative, "cry out every now and then" or "cry in fits and

starts" is momentaneous-iterative. "To put on a coat" is momentaneous,

"to wear a coat" is resultative. As our examples show, aspect is

expressed in English by all kinds of idiomatic turns rather than by a

consistently worked out set of grammatical forms. In many languages

aspect is of far greater formal significance than tense, with which the

naive student is apt to confuse it.]

[Footnote 75: By "modalities" I do not mean the matter of fact

statement, say, of negation or uncertainty as such, rather their

Implication in terms of form. There are languages, for instance, which

have as elaborate an apparatus of negative forms for the verb as Greek

has of the optative or wish-modality.]

[Footnote 76: Compare page 97.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 76 refers to the paragraph beginning on

line 2948.]

[Footnote 77: It is because of this classification of experience that in

many languages the verb forms which are proper, say, to a mythical

narration differ from those commonly used in daily intercourse. We leave

these shades to the context or content ourselves with a more explicit

and roundabout mode of expression, e.g., "He is dead, as I happen to

know," "They say he is dead," "He must be dead by the looks of things."]

[Footnote 78: We say "_I_ sleep" and "_I_ go," as well as "_I_ kill

him," but "he kills _me_." Yet _me_ of the last example is at least as

close psychologically to _I_ of "I sleep" as is the latter to _I_ of "I

kill him." It is only by form that we can classify the "I" notion of "I

sleep" as that of an acting subject. Properly speaking, I am handled by

forces beyond my control when I sleep just as truly as when some one is

killing me. Numerous languages differentiate clearly between active

subject and static subject (_I go_ and _I kill him_ as distinct from _I

sleep_, _I am good_, _I am killed_) or between transitive subject and

intransitive subject (_I kill him_ as distinct from _I sleep_, _I am

good_, _I am killed_, _I go_). The intransitive or static subjects may

or may not be identical with the object of the transitive verb.]

In dealing with words and their varying forms we have had to anticipate

much that concerns the sentence as a whole. Every language has its

special method or methods of binding words into a larger unity. The

importance of these methods is apt to vary with the complexity of the

individual word. The more synthetic the language, in other words, the

more clearly the status of each word in the sentence is indicated by its

own resources, the less need is there for looking beyond the word to the

sentence as a whole. The Latin _agit_ "(he) acts" needs no outside help

to establish its place in a proposition. Whether I say _agit dominus_

"the master acts" or _sic femina agit_ "thus the woman acts," the net

result as to the syntactic feel of the _agit_ is practically the same.

It can only be a verb, the predicate of a proposition, and it can only

be conceived as a statement of activity carried out by a person (or

thing) other than you or me. It is not so with such a word as the

English _act_. _Act_ is a syntactic waif until we have defined its

status in a proposition--one thing in "they act abominably," quite

another in "that was a kindly act." The Latin sentence speaks with the

assurance of its individual members, the English word needs the

prompting of its fellows. Roughly speaking, to be sure. And yet to say

that a sufficiently elaborate word-structure compensates for external

syntactic methods is perilously close to begging the question. The

elements of the word are related to each other in a specific way and

follow each other in a rigorously determined sequence. This is

tantamount to saying that a word which consists of more than a radical

element is a crystallization of a sentence or of some portion of a

sentence, that a form like _agit_ is roughly the psychological[79]

equivalent of a form like _age is_ "act he." Breaking down, then, the

wall that separates word and sentence, we may ask: What, at last

analysis, are the fundamental methods of relating word to word and

element to element, in short, of passing from the isolated notions

symbolized by each word and by each element to the unified proposition

that corresponds to a thought?

[Footnote 79: Ultimately, also historical--say, _age to_ "act that

(one)."]

The answer is simple and is implied in the preceding remarks. The most

fundamental and the most powerful of all relating methods is the method

of order. Let us think of some more or less concrete idea, say a color,

and set down its symbol--_red_; of another concrete idea, say a person

or object, setting down its symbol--_dog_; finally, of a third concrete