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 ...

Both Zbyszek from Poland and Iqbal Ahmad from Pakistan write that they find it difficult to differentiate between transitive and intransitive verbs: 'Please explain the difference and give us some ...

Summertime is here, and with it endless hours of sitting in the shade regretting all the years we spent baking in the sun. Growing up in central Florida, I was part of a community of ...

Nama, a Papuan language spoken in southern New Guinea, indexes the person and number of the A argument of a transitive verb with a suffix, and the P argument with a prefix. For a large subset of ...

I ran into my friend Lou at the farmers market on Saturday, and she looked troubled. This wasn’t because the sweet corn wasn’t in season yet, but because it’s graduation season, and she had a very ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The scene may have been a long coach ride or a London park bench on a hot day, but the heart of the (probably apocryphal ...