When hearing speech in an unfamiliar language, the listener has no explicit information signalling the underlying structural rules that speakers use to produce sentences. Similarly, acquiring the ...

Nouns are by far the largest category of words in English. They signify all kinds of physical things both living and inanimate. They also signify imagined things like ‘a ghost’; and ideas or concepts, ...

We use affirmative word order in questions in spoken rather than written English. Declarative questions can be used when the speaker is fairly sure he has understood what has been said, but he just ...

The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is an eloquent defense of a “live and let live” approach to English. Well, you know what they say about ...