ABSTRACT
It is easy to see that" I gave the boy a lump of sugar" is of a totally different order. Here it is possible to stress any of the essential words and to make a pause, for instance, after" boy," or to substitute" he " or "she" for" I," " lent" for" gave," " Tom" for" the boy," etc. One may insert" never" and make other alterations. While in handling formulas memory, or the repetition of what one has once learned, is everything, free expressions involve another kind of mental activity; they have to be created in each case anew by the speaker, who inserts the words that fit the partiCUlar situation. The sentence he thus creates may, or may not, be different in some one or more respects from anything he has ever heard or uttered before; that is of no importance for our inquiry. What is essential is that in pronouncing it he conforms to a certain pattern. No matter what words he inserts, he builds up the sentence in the same way, and even without any special grammatical training we feel that the two sentences
John gave Mary the apple, My uncle lent the joiner five shillings,
Now, how do such types come into existence in the mind of a speaker 1 An infant is not taught the grammatical rule that the subject is to be placed first, or that the indirect object regularly precedes the direct object; and yet, without any grammatical instruction, from innumerable sentences heard and understood he will abstract some notion of their structure which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own, though it is difficult or impossible to state what that notion is except by means of technical terms like subject, verb, etc. And when the child is heard to use a sentence correctly constructed according to some definite type, neither he nor his hearers are able to tell whether it is something new he has created himself or simply a sentence which he has heard before in exactly the same shape. The only thing that matters is that he is understood, and this he will be if his sentence s in accordance with the speech habits of the community in which
he happens to be living. Had he been a French child, he would have heard an infinite number of sentences like
Pierre donne une pomme a. Jean, Louise a donne sa poupee a. sa soour, etc.,
II va donner un sou a. ce pauvre enfant. And had he been a German boy, he would have constructed the corresponding sentences according to another type still, with dem and der instead of the French el, etc. (Of. Language, Ch. VII.)
If, then, free expressions are defined as expressions created on the spur of the moment after a certain type which has come into existence in the speaker's subconsciousness as a result of his having heard many sentences possessing some trait or traits in common, it follows that the distinction between them and formulas cannot always be discovered except through a fairly close analysis; to the hearer the two stand at first on the same footing, and accordingly formulas can and do playa great part in the formation of types in the minds of speakers, the more so as many of them are of very frequent occurrence. Let us take a few more examples.
