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, ...

In English, our sentences usually operate using a similar pattern: subject, verb, then object. The nice part about this type of structure is that it lets your reader easily know who is doing the ...

Subject-verb agreement means that your verb must be conjugated, or changed, to fit (or agree) with the subject. Subjects can be singular or plural. Think of singular and plural as mathematical ...

Phrasal verbs represent a practically limitless group of verbs that can be combined with short adverbs or prepositions to produce new meanings. Here are some examples: Phrasal verbs are ubiquitous in ...

Imagine trying to speak without expressing possibility, permission,or necessity; it would be like painting without colour. That’s were the modal verb step in. These special helping verbs—can, could, ...

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 ...