Note 138 — Chapter XI

In this connection it is interesting to observe the absence of the copula. Notwithstanding the strongly imitative tendencies of a child’s mind, and notwithstanding that our English children hear the copula expressed in almost every statement that is made to them, their own propositions, while still in the preconceptual phase, dispense with it (see above, p. 204). In thus trusting to apposition alone, without expressing any sign of relation, the young child is conveying in spoken language an immediate translation of the mental acts concerned in predication. As previously noticed, we meet with precisely the same fact in the natural language of gesture, even after this has been wrought up into the elaborate conceptual systems of the Indians and deaf-mutes. Lastly, in a subsequent chapter we shall see that the same has to be said of all the more primitive forms of spoken language which are still extant among savages. So that here again we meet with additional proof, were any required, of the folly of regarding the copula as an essential ingredient of a proposition.