About a decade ago, I read a blog written by a linguistics student who proclaimed, “Prescriptivism must die!!!” He was talking about the school of thought that believes that textbooks and other ...

Chaise longues — those reclining full-length chairs that beckon you to the beach — are making me nostalgic. Not for days when I had more free time and closer proximity to the ocean, but for days when ...

We start this page with the hypothesis that the lexicon is initially underspecified: that some features may be NIL (not specified as either plus or minus). A NIL feature is represented either with no ...

“Although there are no hard and fast grammatical rules, it’s better to err on the side of caution, following rules that courts have recognized.” To quote a popular saying: “Let’s eat grandpa. Let’s ...

In a prologue to “The Sense of Style,” subtitled “A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” the brain scientist Steven Pinker explains that he’s been reading style manuals of late, ...

They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as ...

You may have heard about the marvel that is the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, more commonly referred to as GPT-3. GPT-3 is a “large language” artificial intelligence algorithm that has achieved ...

The love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised to the casual human listener. But fresh mathematical analysis of shows there are complex grammatical rules. Using ...