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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: CHAPTER III PARTS OF SPEECH IN EARLY LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT i. Sentence-words A Number of students of infant linguistics, as Holden,1 Methods of classifying Humphreys,2 Tracy,3 et al, have endeavored to determine the child's the relative frequency of the several parts of speech in the voca ary' child's language during successive periods in his early linguistic development. They have made lists of all the words spoken by a number of children between the ages of fifteen months and three years approximately, classifying them according to the standard grammatical categories. Following this method of treatment, Tracy has calculated that of five thousand four hundred words employed by twelve children from nineteen to thirty months of age, and reported by several investigators, 60 per cent are nouns, 20 per cent are verbs, 9' per cent are adjectives, 5 per cent are adverbs, 2 per cent are prepo- j sitions, 1.7 per cent are interjections, and 0.3 per cent are conjunctions. 1 On the "Vocabularies of Children of Two Years of Age," Trans. Am. Phil. Assn, 1877, p. 58 et seq. 1 "A Contribution to Infantile Linguistics," Trans. Am. Phil. Assn, 1880, p. 3 et seq. 3 "Psychology of Childhood," Chap. V. Now, it will be apparent upon a little reflection that this method of treating the child's vocabulary is external and formal. The classification is based upon the structure of words regarded ab extra, rather than upon their function in expression. Tracy, and all who use his method, take a logical orjjranimatical, not a psychological, point of view. To illustrate the principle in question, when K, at eleven months, says hii (hat), she always sees the object and thrusts her arms toward it, indicating plainly enough that she wishes to reach it. The word is uttered in an im.
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