Harold in Clifton Park, N.Y., wrote recently to ask me about the grammar of the sentences “I couldn’t care less” and “I could care less.” Until then, I thought there were just two kinds of people in ...

Bearing in mind the formal and functional complexity of the category of verbal nouns in Irish (henceforth VNs), it is not surprising that it continues to be the subject of intensive research. Much has ...

In modern linguistics, the study of language is often separated into distinct areas such as phonetics (sound production and reception), phonology (sound patterns), semantics (word and sentence meaning ...

Language is a unique evolutionary achievement considered to have decisively driven the sophistication of human cognition 1. Comprehending spoken language, which is the focus of this article, is the ...

As language users we monitor our own writing, speech, reading, and oral reception of sentences as shaped by grammatical relations. We, in fact, cognize language as such in the act of using it, and we ...

Semantics are important. They tell us what something means. Without semantics you just have a jumble of syntax. The better defined the semantics are, the less likely something is to be mis-interpreted ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...