Instead of "a rich man."

But are there not certain ideas that it is impossible to render except

by way of such and such parts of speech? What can be done with the "to"

of "he came to the house"? Well, we can say "he reached the house" and

dodge the preposition altogether, giving the verb a nuance that absorbs

the idea of local relation carried by the "to." But let us insist on

giving independence to this idea of local relation. Must we not then

hold to the preposition? No, we can make a noun of it. We can say

something like "he reached the proximity of the house" or "he reached

the house-locality." Instead of saying "he looked into the glass" we may

say "he scrutinized the glass-interior." Such expressions are stilted in

English because they do not easily fit into our formal grooves, but in

language after language we find that local relations are expressed in

just this way. The local relation is nominalized. And so we might go on

examining the various parts of speech and showing how they not merely

grade into each other but are to an astonishing degree actually

convertible into each other. The upshot of such an examination would be

to feel convinced that the "part of speech" reflects not so much our

intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality

into a variety of formal patterns. A part of speech outside of the

limitations of syntactic form is but a will o' the wisp. For this reason

no logical scheme of the parts of speech--their number, nature, and

necessary confines--is of the slightest interest to the linguist. Each

language has its own scheme. Everything depends on the formal

demarcations which it recognizes.

Yet we must not be too destructive. It is well to remember that speech

consists of a series of propositions. There must be something to talk

about and something must be said about this subject of discourse once it

is selected. This distinction is of such fundamental importance that the

vast majority of languages have emphasized it by creating some sort of

formal barrier between the two terms of the proposition. The subject of

discourse is a noun. As the most common subject of discourse is either a

person or a thing, the noun clusters about concrete concepts of that

order. As the thing predicated of a subject is generally an activity in

the widest sense of the word, a passage from one moment of existence to

another, the form which has been set aside for the business of

predicating, in other words, the verb, clusters about concepts of

activity. No language wholly fails to distinguish noun and verb, though

in particular cases the nature of the distinction may be an elusive one.

It is different with the other parts of speech. Not one of them is

imperatively required for the life of language.[91]

[Footnote 91: In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though

there are certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw

them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there are,

strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. The adjective is a verb. So

are the numeral, the interrogative pronoun (e.g., "to be what?"), and

certain "conjunctions" and adverbs (e.g., "to be and" and "to be not";

one says "and-past-I go," i.e., "and I went"). Adverbs and prepositions

are either nouns or merely derivative affixes in the verb.]

VI

TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE

So far, in dealing with linguistic form, we have been concerned only

with single words and with the relations of words in sentences. We have

not envisaged whole languages as conforming to this or that general

type. Incidentally we have observed that one language runs to tight-knit

synthesis where another contents itself with a more analytic, piece-meal

handling of its elements, or that in one language syntactic relations

appear pure which in another are combined with certain other notions

that have something concrete about them, however abstract they may be

felt to be in practice. In this way we may have obtained some inkling of

what is meant when we speak of the general form of a language. For it

must be obvious to any one who has thought about the question at all or

who has felt something of the spirit of a foreign language that there is

such a thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. This type

or plan or structural "genius" of the language is something much more

fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature of it that we

can mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its nature by a mere

recital of the sundry facts that make up the grammar of the language.

When we pass from Latin to Russian, we feel that it is approximately the

same horizon that bounds our view, even though the near, familiar

landmarks have changed. When we come to English, we seem to notice that

the hills have dipped down a little, yet we recognize the general lay

of the land. And when we have arrived at Chinese, it is an utterly

different sky that is looking down upon us. We can translate these

metaphors and say that all languages differ from one another but that

certain ones differ far more than others. This is tantamount to saying

that it is possible to group them into morphological types.

Strictly speaking, we know in advance that it is impossible to set up a

limited number of types that would do full justice to the peculiarities

of the thousands of languages and dialects spoken on the surface of the

earth. Like all human institutions, speech is too variable and too

elusive to be quite safely ticketed. Even if we operate with a minutely

subdivided scale of types, we may be quite certain that many of our

languages will need trimming before they fit. To get them into the

scheme at all it will be necessary to overestimate the significance of

this or that feature or to ignore, for the time being, certain

contradictions in their mechanism. Does the difficulty of classification

prove the uselessness of the task? I do not think so. It would be too

easy to relieve ourselves of the burden of constructive thinking and to

take the standpoint that each language has its unique history, therefore