form-grooves

It needs no labored argument to prove that the concept of plurality is here hardly less concrete than that of location “in the east, ” and that the Yana form corresponds in feeling not so much to our “They burn in the east” (ardunt oriente) as to a “Burn-several-east-s, it plurally burns in the east, ” an expression which we cannot adequately assimilate for lack of the necessary form-grooves into which to run it.

Chapter 5. Form in Language: Grammatical Concepts 1921