This paper develops further the theory of morphemic analysis presented by Zellig S. Harris in 1942. Morphemic analysis is the operation by which the analyst isolates minimum meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, and decides which occurrences of such elements shall be regarded as occurrences of ‘the same’ element.

One of the European scholars that we have been fortunate enough to attract to this country is Giuliano Bonfante. The great importance of such newcomers for American scholarship is largely based upon the different scholastic traditions that they bring to us. Bonfante, for example, was trained in the Italian school of linguistics—neolinguistica, they call it—which was developed in sharp opposition to the doctrines of the German neogrammarians of the past seventy-five years or so. This neolinguistic method has until recently remained almost entirely unknown on this side of the ocean, and Bonfante's energetic support of it cannot fail to do us good.

[Skt. śilpá- ‘many-colored’ and śíla- n. ‘adornment; craft’, largely synonymous with formations of piś- ‘to adorn’ (like péśas- ‘adornment’ etc.), is a transposition of *piśrá-, *piślá-, identical with Slavic pъstrъ ‘many-colored’, Pre-Slavic *pik̂ro-.]

The etymology of Sp. cosecha ‘harvest’, cosechar ‘to reap’ has been repeatedly debated; a satisfactory solution remains to be provided. The word family involved is relatively small. Col. cosechero ‘tobacco grower’ and Argent. cosechadora ‘reaping machine’ are historically irrelevant derivatives. The variant form cosecho, identified in Puerto Rico, is worth remembering, since the Antilles are known to harbor numerous lexical archaisms. No less noteworthy are Amer. Sp. cogienda ‘harvest’ (reminiscent in form of fazienda ‘property’, originally ‘business’, and of vivienda 'dwelling') and especially cosechana and cosecharroza, both signifying 'clearance of land' in the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico). Cogienda clearly indicates connection with coger ‘to grasp’ < Lat. colligere; cosechana and cosecharroza, explicitly defined as ‘the cutting and burning of virgin wood’, suggests relationship with Lat. *sectāre ‘to cut’, a reconstructed base believed, on good evidence, to have entrenched itself in the Astur-Leonese and the Galician dialect areas, originally as an intensive variant of secāre. Through the links which they suggest, these three American-Spanish formations introduce us to the intricacy of the etymological problem raised by cosecha and cosechar.

The inflection of verbs in present-day colloquial English has been described in many works—most clearly and exhaustively, perhaps, by Sweet, Palmer, Curme, Fries, Jespersen, and Hockett. In view of the number and fullness of these descriptions, no new treatment can hope to add any facts hitherto overlooked: at most, a new treatment may be able to arrange the known facts more systematically than has been done before, or in a way that will be more useful to other linguists.

[Examples of the present progressive having minimal contrast with the simple present make ‘base tense’ or ‘fact of process’ a better description of the simple present than ‘constitution of things’, the latter being, however, the most important corollary.]