It’s again that time of year when dictionary publishers select a ‘word of the year’. Here is a list of the English words of 2025 selected by the main dictionaries: parasocial: involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book,…… Continue reading Words of 2025
Month: December 2025
Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts
Theories of syntax do not view analyse sentences as an unstructured sequence of words. Instead, they analyse sentences down into immediate constituents, and then further down into sub-constituents and ultimately down into single words. For example: the sentence Jane helps John might be analysed down into the immediate constituents Jane and helps John; and the…… Continue reading Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts
How long should a paragraph be?
Advice on writing often suggests that a paragraph should deal with a single idea, and that writers should start a new paragraph once they move on to a new idea. That advice implies that: a paragraph can be as short as a single sentence, or even as short as a single word; and there is…… Continue reading How long should a paragraph be?
Albanian verbs that can be transitive or intransitive
Many languages have pairs of verbs (one transitive and one transitive) that are related to each other morphologically. One such pair is Japanese ak-u ‘to open (intransitive)’ and ak-e-ru ‘to open (transitive)’. I’ve written before about a database of such pairs: the World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs (WATP). Some World Atlases about languages – Language…… Continue reading Albanian verbs that can be transitive or intransitive
Position of pronouns in French
This post deals with the order of pronouns in French. French pronouns are clitics. A clitic could be defined a word that is closely integrated phonologically with another word (its host), so that the clitic and host together form a single phonological word. French pronouns usually precede the verb In most cases, French pronouns immediately…… Continue reading Position of pronouns in French
Languages in Finland
A booklet called The languages of Finland 1917-2017 was written to celebrate Finland’s centenary as an independent state. The author, Fred Karlsson, Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, and author of Finnish: a comprehensive grammar (2018). The booklet is available online at Languages of Finland_1917-2017.pdf (helsinki.fi), along with Finnish and Swedish…… Continue reading Languages in Finland
Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Looking around the Old Bazaar in the Albanian town of Kruja, we came across this book by the dictator Enver Hoxha who ruled Albanian from 1944 until 1985. Photo: Kate Clark The book is volume 2 of a Russian translation of his Selected Works. (A few doors down the road, we saw half a dozen…… Continue reading Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Some similarities between Russian and German
I was 15 when I started learning Russian at school, after 4 years of learning German. Although there are many differences between German and Russian, my confidence grew early from discovering some similarities between those 2 languages. I discuss some of the similarities briefly below. 1. Cases Both languages have retained complex systems of case…… Continue reading Some similarities between Russian and German
Citation form for English verbs
The form used as the name of a noun or verb is sometimes known as the noun or verb’s citation form. In some Indo-European languages, the citation form for a verb is its infinitive. In many cases, the infinitive has an inflectional suffix, for example French infinitives generally end in -er, -ir, -re or -oir.…… Continue reading Citation form for English verbs
Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns
Theories about ‘binding’ try to explain when a noun phrase must, may or must not refer to the same item as an earlier noun phrase in the same sentence (an antecedent). Binding theories typically identify 3 types of noun phrases: anaphors, such as herself in example 1 below. An anaphora must have an antecedent in…… Continue reading Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns