tically exhausted, and I have PART ONE THE SENTENCE UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA INTRODUCTION It is true that The unit of study in grammar is the sentence. grammar has much to say about words, but it deals with them only as elements of sentences. It is the function of a word in a sentence that determines what part of speech it is, and, if it is inflected, what form it shall take. As language is only the garment in which thought clothes itself, grammar has both a logical and a formal side. On the former, it deals with the various logical relations that underlie the sentence; on the latter, it deals with the external forms through which these relations are expressed. These forms differ in different languages, and in the same language at different periods; but the relations underlying them are universal and unchangeable. They are the basic facts of grammar. In our study of grammar, therefore, we shal proceed from the thought to the form in which, in the English language, it embodies itself. Ideas. I. THOUGHTS AND IDEAS A sentence is the expression in words of a thought. The materials of thought are ideas. To understand what an idea is, fix your mind on some object with which you are familiar, an orange, for example. No sooner do you think "orange" than an image of that fruit, more or less distinct, rises in your mind. This image is an idea. Not all ideas, however, are visual images. We have ideas of sounds, for example: we also have ideas of objects that we cannot perceive by any of the senses, as the soul and God; that is, we have notions of what these things are, and these notions are ideas. Kinds of Ideas. 1. If you analyze your idea of any object, you will find that it is made up of a number of other ideas. Your idea of an orange is made up of ideas of roundness, yellowness, juiciness, and the like: your idea of a bird includes not only ideas of size, color, and so on, but ideas of actions, as flight, song, and nest-building. Just so all our 224670 |