We break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence. There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

Good news, kind of. I discovered a new sentence structure I hate. It’s a pattern I see often but only recently, while editing an article, realized it belongs in my writing hall of shame. Why would I ...

This paper explores the knowledge of linguistic structure learned by large artificial neural networks, trained via self-supervision, whereby the model simply tries to predict a masked word in a given ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Years ago, a copy editor working on a reporter’s story changed some of the “whiches” to “thats” when they were being ...