as involving a necessary relation, otherwise there would be no reason to express the concept twice, in the noun and in the verb.  Time also is clearly felt as a relational concept; if it were not, we should be allowed to say the farmer killed-s to correspond to the farmer kill-s.  Of the four concepts inextricably interwoven in the _-s_ suffix, all are felt as relational, two necessarily so.  The distinction between a truly relational concept and one that is so felt and treated, though it need not be in the nature of things, will receive further attention in a moment.

[Footnote 54:  It is, of course, an “accident” that _-s_ denotes plurality in the noun, singularity in the verb.]

Finally, I can radically disturb the relational cut of the sentence by changing the order of its elements.  If the positions of farmer and kills are interchanged, the sentence reads kills the farmer the duckling, which is most naturally interpreted as an unusual but not unintelligible mode of asking the question, does the farmer kill the duckling? In this new sentence the act is not conceived as necessarily taking place at all.  It may or it may not be happening, the implication being that the speaker wishes to know the truth of the matter and that the person spoken to is expected to give him the information.  The interrogative sentence possesses an entirely different “modality” from the declarative one and implies a markedly different attitude of the speaker towards his companion.  An even more striking change in personal relations is effected if we interchange the farmer and the duckling. The duckling kills the farmer involves precisely the same subjects of discourse and the same type of activity as our first sentence, but the roles of these subjects of discourse are now reversed.  The duckling has turned, like the proverbial worm, or, to put it in grammatical terminology, what was “subject” is now “object,” what was object is now subject.

The following tabular statement analyzes the sentence from the point of view of the concepts expressed in it and of the grammatical processes employed for their expression.

 I. CONCRETE CONCEPTS: 
    1.  First subject of discourse:  farmer
    2.  Second subject of discourse:  duckling
    3.  Activity:  kill
    ——­ analyzable into: 
  A. RADICAL CONCEPTS: 
        1.  Verb:  (to) farm
        2.  Noun:  duck
        3.  Verb:  kill
  B. DERIVATIONAL CONCEPTS: 
        1.  Agentive:  expressed by suffix _-er_
        2.  Diminutive:  expressed by suffix _-ling_
II.  RELATIONAL CONCEPTS: 
    Reference: 
      1.  Definiteness of reference to first subject of discourse: 
          expressed by first the, which has preposed position
      2.  Definiteness of reference to second subject of discourse: 
          expressed