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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Lexical semantics can be defined as ‘the study of meaning’, therefore semanticists are interested in the lexical meaning of words rather than grammatical meaning. It is not so much a practical topic ...

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 ...