ABSTRACT
The morphological structure of every living language is unstable. In short, the morphological system used by every speaker contains within itself as many causes of change as the phonetic system. Analogy is, indeed, the foundation of all morphology. Analogy depends, to a certain extent, upon the law of least effort, which forbids the overloading of the memory with useless material. The morphological debris remaining after the action of phonetic laws have done their worst, are rarely significant enough to be preserved as such. The grammatical instruments which language employs are the debris of old autonomous words emptied of the meaning proper to them and used, like symbols, as simple exponents. It is probable that the Indo-European or Semitic inflection is the result of the agglutination to the stem of elements originally independent, which floated at first in its vicinity, and in time became one with it.
