Some Thoughts on Why Participles Express Urgency?

Sep 21, 2015 by

A recent LanguageLog post by Mark Liberman about a Doonesbury cartoon made me wonder about the import of different English verb forms. The first two and last two panels of the cartoon are reproduced on the left. Liberman writes: The...

read more

The Anatomy of “Touching”

Mar 20, 2015 by

The Anatomy of “Touching”

The verb ‘to touch’ in Russian—kasat’sja and its perfective counterpart kosnut’sja—is a very peculiar one, in several respects. To begin with, it is unusual in having the clitic –sja, without any of the meanings typically...

read more

Je Suis “Random Folk in a Deli”—What Went Wrong With Obama’s Remark?...

Feb 20, 2015 by

Je Suis “Random Folk in a Deli”—What Went Wrong With Obama’s Remark?

Last week, the lowly English adverb randomly found itself at the center of a political controversy. In an interview, President Obama made a comment that generated a barrage of criticisms from Republicans and from Jewish organizations...

read more

It’s not all black and white

Nov 30, 2011 by

It’s not all black and white

As was discussed in earlier postings, the cross-linguistic range of color terms is quite complex and languages differ as to how the treat the color spectrum (e.g., see how Hanunoo does it). But interestingly, not all uses of color...

read more

A man and a woman…

Nov 23, 2011 by

A man and a woman…

[Thanks to Joel M. Hoffman for his inspiring pieces in the Jerusalem Post Glamour of Grammar column on “The birds and the bees” and “Girl people and boy people”. The title of this post alludes to the the...

read more

What’s in a (Russian) name?

Nov 23, 2011 by

What’s in a (Russian) name?

[All names below are presented in the transliteration, rather than the more traditional English spelling] This post is in response to a question by John Cowan in connection with an earlier post that mentioned the Russian system of...

read more