CHICAGO (Reuters) - Irregular verbs are the bane of any effort to learn English, but new research looking at how language evolves suggests frequent use keeps pesky irregular verbs like "take" from ...

Natural languages comprise elaborate systems of rules that enable one speaker to communicate with another 7. These rules serve to simplify the production of language and enable an infinite array of ...

This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I’ll return with fresh material. For decades, ...

The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature. In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the ...

As in the case of the noun, we adopt the hypothesis that all grammatical features originate here as a bundle of features together with the verb stem. How the grammatical features end up in the feature ...

English has rules. Teachers insist on them. Exams depend on them. Grammar books list them carefully. And yet, English breaks its own rules all the time. Take pl ...