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 ...

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 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 ...

The distinction between “lay” and “lie” continues to fade. Almost without exception, people say, “I laid on the couch.” They never seem to say, “I lay on the couch.” Plus, people usually throw in 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 ...