specific linguistic conditions. Language as a collective art.
Necessary esthetic advantages or limitations in any language. Style
as conditioned by inherent features of the language. Prosody as
conditioned by the phonetic dynamics of a language.

INDEX




I

INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE DEFINED


Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to
define it. It seems as natural to man as walking, and only less so than
breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that
this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of
acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing
from the process of learning to walk. In the case of the latter
function, culture, in other words, the traditional body of social usage,
is not seriously brought into play. The child is individually equipped,
by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make
all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking.
Indeed, the very conformation of these muscles and of the appropriate
parts of the nervous system may be said to be primarily adapted to the
movements made in walking and in similar activities. In a very real
sense the normal human being is predestined to walk, not because his
elders will assist him to learn the art, but because his organism is