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On Principles and Methods in Latin Syntax
On Principles and Methods in Latin Syntax Author:Edward Parmelee Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE MEANS OF EXPRESSING RELATIONS The means employed in language for the expression of the relations between concepts are in part the same as the means... more » at the command of language for expressing the concepts themselves, and in linguistic discussions the two are often treated together without distinction. It is not, in fact, possible to draw a clear line of distinction. In general, single words correspond to distinct substantive concepts and the study of their association with such concepts belongs to lexicography and semantics. But when a relation, as a result of frequent use, comes to be clearly and vividly felt, it has itself become a concept, apparently much as any concept is formed from percepts, and may then be expressed by a single word — a preposition or conjunction — the study of which belongs alike to semantics and to syntax. Inflected words also have both meaning and function and, just as in Latin the stem is never found without an inflectional ending, so the meaning and the function always go together and are inseparable. Even the parts of speech have to do partly with word-meaning and partly with syntactical function, since the differentiation is brought about within the sentence in the effort to express relation. The verb does not differ from the noun in meaning only, but also in use. Theordinary definition of the verb as a word which denotes action or state and of the noun as the name of a person or thing is evidently one-sided and defective, since a noun may denote action or existence and a verb-form may be the name of a thing. Another and truer distinction is based upon the use to which words are put in combination, and the differentiation of parts of speech is a means of expressing at the same time substantive concepts and concepts of relation. No definit...« less