THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH

We have more than once referred to the "elements of speech," by which we

understood, roughly speaking, what are ordinarily called "words." We

must now look more closely at these elements and acquaint ourselves with

the stuff of language.

The very simplest element of speech--and by

"speech" we shall hence-forth mean the auditory system of speech

symbolism, the flow of spoken words--is the individual sound, though, as

we shall see later on, the sound is not itself a simple structure but

the resultant of a series of independent, yet closely correlated,

adjustments in the organs of speech.

And yet the individual sound is

not, properly considered, an element of speech at all, for speech is a

significant function and the sound as such has no significance. It

happens occasionally that the single sound is an independently

significant element (such as French _a_ "has" and _a_ "to" or Latin _i_

"go!"), but such cases are fortuitous coincidences between individual

sound and significant word. The coincidence is apt to be fortuitous not

only in theory but in point of actual historic fact; thus, the instances

cited are merely reduced forms of originally fuller phonetic

groups--Latin _habet_ and _ad_ and Indo-European _ei_ respectively. If

language is a structure and if the significant elements of language are

the bricks of the structure, then the sounds of speech can only be

compared to the unformed and unburnt clay of which the bricks are

fashioned. In this chapter we shall have nothing further to do with

sounds as sounds.

The true, significant elements of language are generally sequences of

sounds that are either words, significant parts of words, or word

groupings. What distinguishes each of these elements is that it is the

outward sign of a specific idea, whether of a single concept or image or

of a number of such concepts or images definitely connected into a

whole.

The single word may or may not be the simplest significant

element we have to deal with. The English words _sing_, _sings_,

_singing_, _singer_ each conveys a perfectly definite and intelligible

idea, though the idea is disconnected and is therefore functionally of

no practical value. We recognize immediately that these words are of two

sorts. The first word, _sing_, is an indivisible phonetic entity

conveying the notion of a certain specific activity.

The other words all

involve the same fundamental notion but, owing to the addition of other

phonetic elements, this notion is given a particular twist that modifies

or more closely defines it. They represent, in a sense, compounded

concepts that have flowered from the fundamental one. We may, therefore,

analyze the words _sings_, _singing_, and _singer_ as binary expressions

involving a fundamental concept, a concept of subject matter (_sing_),

and a further concept of more abstract order--one of person, number,

time, condition, function, or of several of these combined