whatsoever is that it is imitative. And this characteristic
belongs exclusively to social facts.[22]

Tarde's theory of transmission by imitation may be regarded, in some
sense, as complementary, if not supplementary, to Wundt's theory of
origins, since he puts the emphasis on the fact of transmission rather
than upon genesis. In a paper, "Tendencies in Comparative Philology,"
read at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St. Louis Exposition in
1904, Professor Hanns Oertel, of Yale University, refers to Tarde's
theory of imitation as an alternative explanation to that offered by
Wundt for "the striking uniformity of sound changes" which students of
language have discovered in the course of their investigation of
phonetic changes in widely different forms of speech.

It seems hard to maintain that the change in a syntactical
construction or in the meaning of a word owes its universality
to a simultaneous and independent primary change in all the
members of a speech-community. By adopting the theory of
imitative spread, all linguistic changes may be viewed as one
homogeneous whole. In the second place, the latter view seems
to bring linguistic changes into line with the other social
changes, such as modifications in institutions, beliefs, and
customs. For is it not an essential characteristic of a social
group that its members are not co-operative in the sense that
each member actively participates in the production of every
single element which goes to make up either language, or
belief, or customs? Distinguishing thus between _primary_ and
_secondary_ changes and between the _origin_ of a change and
its _spread_, it behooves us to examine carefully into the
causes which make the members of a social unit, either
consciously or unconsciously, willing to accept the innovation.
What is it that determines acceptance or rejection of a
particular change? What limits one change to a small area,
while it extends the area of another? Before a final decision
can be reached in favor of the second theory of imitative
spread it will be necessary to follow out in minute detail the
mechanism of this process in a number of concrete instances; in
other words to fill out the picture of which Tarde (_Les lois
de l'imitation_) sketched the bare outlines. If his assumptions
prove true, then we should h