The Oxford comma. “Ask” instead of “aks.” There, their, and they’re. The legitimacy of “ain’t” and “y’all.” These are familiar, if sometimes contentious, issues in the usage of the English language.

A new study has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study also applied the same statistical ...

The new question-of-the-week is: How should we teach grammar to students? Our students need to learn grammar, but the real question is how to teach it in ways that don’t bore them out of their minds.

Michelle Sheehan has in the past received funding from the British Academy and Language Acts and Worldmaking (OWRI). People get corrected on their language all the time. With written language, this is ...

The laws of grammar may be arbitrary, as those who would simply dismiss them assert. But arbitrary laws are just the ones that need enforcement. Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it ...

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Is a preposition a good word to end a sentence on? And can you begin sentences with a conjunction? What about if you just play a little ...

People get corrected on their language all the time. With written language, this is mostly about spelling and punctuation. In some cases, though – especially when speaking – we’re pulled up on our ...