ABSTRACT
Acknowledging that the research already conducted for the project had ‘revealed in the clearest way the extraordinary and unlocked for complexity of all phases of the question of linguistic form, logic, and psychology’ (ibid.), Sapir had learned an important lesson from his comparative semantic research for IALA. No longer could he be under illusions regarding the extent and the difficulty of the task in which he was engaged, and once the studies already underway had been completed, Sapir himself never again explored comparative semantics.
