That one word speaks volumes. By John McWhorter A.I. and spell-check make choices for writers. With real, physical dictionaries, writers are empowered to decide how to express themselves. By ...

Universal Grammar (UG) allows a multitude of devices that can be drawn on to express focus. The child's task is to reconcile the possible UG options with the positive data provided by the target ...

Like the subject, the object is usually a noun (‘the piano’) or a noun phrase, (‘the big, black piano’). Verbs that take objects describe some kind of action rather than a state of being.

When I entered first grade in 1963, public-school pedagogy was in the throes of a revolution. The traditional grammar school (where children learned, inter alia, grammar) had been transformed into the ...

The story of how a gendered word became a universal pronoun says a lot about how language evolves. By John McWhorter Faced with a roomful of bored students, Jacob Mitchell found a way to make adverbs ...