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 ...

The past week witnessed the frequent occurrence of the words ‘resign’ and its derivative ‘resignation’ in the print, electronic and social media, thanks to LK Advani who stunned the BJP with his ...

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 ...

AS we took up in this column last week, intransitive verbs like "gone" and "disappear" are of the kind that can't pass on their action to a direct object. This is why sentence constructions like "The ...

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 ...

There are three basic kinds of verbs plus many subclasses. Here we cover only the three basic types. Initially, verbs are divided into main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Then auxiliary verbs are divided ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Let’s dive below the “surface” and look at some changing usage. Most of the time, “surface” is a noun, meaning a ...

AS we should all know by now, intransitive verbs are handicapped by their inability to take a direct object. Another way of saying this is that a subject cannot perform the action of intransitive ...

Ruth Walker writes:Have you ever seen people vote with their feet for a certain path across a stretch of green, on a campus, perhaps, or in a public park? Have you ever seen people vote with their ...