Excerpt from Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, Vol. 3

This practically universal disposition towards economy of utteranée has been one - though doubtless not the principal one of the agencies which have contributed to the development and diffusion of the Sign language. In a rudimentary form this prevails everywhere. We see it exemplified daily in numerous gestures in which the move ment of some part of the body indicates to the eye what the lips neglect to put into words. But what concerns us here specifically is the effect of this disposition upon the structure of the sentence. No small number of the rules laid down in our grammars are for the pur pose oi meeting the requirements of the situation produced by the desire of the users of speech to express what they have to say with the least expenditure of effort. Take as one illustration out of many the grammatical construction called apposition. It is called into being for no other purpose than to explain a practice of omitting words for the Sake of economy of utterance, which has established itself so generally that it has come to seem normal. Hence we never take into account the fact that it denotes nothing more than the abridgment of a complete dependent phrase. This is but a single fact out of the multitude of facts of this sort which the student of the grammar of every tongue meets on every side. In going through the process we call parsing we are constantly under the necessity of declaring some word to be understood. Its presence is not required for comprehension; but grammar requires it for the explanation of the construction. Language abounds in these short cuts to expres sion. Every tongue has peculiarities of its own in this respect which other tongues, at least some other tongues, will not tolerate at all. We have a striking illustration of this in English in the constant omission of the relative. In such a sentence as The man you saw yesterday came to-day, no one, whether speaking or hearing, feels the absence of the pronoun. It is only when we set out to analyze the sentence grammatically that we recognize the need of dragging into light the suppressed relative. This is a usage to which many languages cannot resort; but there is probably not a language on the globe in which a Single word is not made to do often the duty of a whole sen tence.

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