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The ideas expressed by these mediating elements they may be independent words, affixes, or modifications of the radical element may be called "derivational" or "qualifying." Some concrete concepts, such as kill, are expressed radically; others, such as farmer and duckling, are expressed derivatively.
But what prevents us from throwing in these "dispensable" or "secondary" relational concepts with the large, floating group of derivational, qualifying concepts that we have already discussed? Is there, after all is said and done, a fundamental difference between a qualifying concept like the negative in unhealthy and a relational one like the number concept in books?
The nature of these four classes of concepts as regards their concreteness or their power to express syntactic relations may be thus symbolized: Material / I. Basic Concepts Content \ II. Derivational Concepts Relation / III. Concrete Relational Concepts \ IV. Pure Relational Concepts These schemes must not be worshipped as fetiches.
A language that runs to synthesis of this loose-jointed sort may be looked upon as an example of the ideal agglutinative type, particularly if the concepts expressed by the agglutinated elements are relational or, at the least, belong to the abstracter class of derivational ideas. Instructive forms may be cited from Nootka. We shall return to our "fire in the house."
As far as Latin and Greek are concerned, their inflection consists essentially of the fusing of elements that express logically impure relational concepts with radical elements and with elements expressing derivational concepts. Both fusion as a general method and the expression of relational concepts in the word are necessary to the notion of "inflection."
Concepts which we should never dream of treating in a subordinate fashion are symbolized by derivational affixes or "symbolic" changes in the radical element, while the more abstract notions, including the syntactic relations, may also be conveyed by the word. A polysynthetic language illustrates no principles that are not already exemplified in the more familiar synthetic languages.
This is also true of many languages of type B, the terms "agglutinative," "fusional," and "symbolic" applying in their case merely to the treatment of the derivational, not the relational, concepts. Such languages could be termed "agglutinative-isolating," "fusional-isolating" and "symbolic-isolating."
By a "fusional-agglutinative" language we would understand one that fuses its derivational elements but allows a greater independence to those that indicate relations. All these and similar distinctions are not merely theoretical possibilities, they can be abundantly illustrated from the descriptive facts of linguistic morphology.
For such languages the number concept has no syntactic significance whatever, is not essentially conceived of as defining a relation, but falls into the group of derivational or even of basic concepts. In English, however, as in French, German, Latin, Greek indeed in all the languages that we have most familiarity with the idea of number is not merely appended to a given concept of a thing.
There are, of course, also not a few instances of transitions between groups I and II and I and III, as well as of the less radical one between II and III. To the first of these transitions belongs that whole class of examples in which the independent word, after passing through the preliminary stage of functioning as the secondary or qualifying element in a compound, ends up by being a derivational affix pure and simple, yet without losing the memory of its former independence.
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