WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions.For instance, perhaps ...

Talk to most people about grammar and you’re likely to hear a lot about little issues that are, essentially, language trivia — matters like when to use “whom,” how to use “between” and whether you can ...

WE all know that when a sentence uses a transitive verb as the operative verb, it's absolutely necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: "The woman spurned her suitor last ...

To first-time learners of the English language, what could easily be its most baffling aspect is its use of the so-called causatives. English uses this strange grammatical structure to denote ...

Dave in Elkland, Pa., wrote to me recently about pronouns ending in “self” — myself, yourself and so on — and how annoying they can be at times. “‘Myself,’ in particular, drives me near distraction,” ...

This paper attempts to extend from syntax (basic word order) to morphology (the distribution of pronouns and their exponents) one of the three functional principles that Tomlin (1986) invokes in order ...