Language Miscellany

I want to use the following sentence: ‘each of the UK’s last 5 Prime Ministers was worse than their predecessor’.  That sentence could have 2 readings: I intend the distributive meaning. One way to make that clear is to spell this out very clearly, as above, but that could produce some long-winded wording. There is… Continue reading Collective and distributive readings of ‘their’

In reviewing draft documents, I often used to come across cases where someone had written different where they really meant various. Although this was particularly common for people who learnt English as a 2nd language, people with English as 1st language often make the same mistake as well. Let me give an example: (1) translations… Continue reading Don’t write ‘different’ if you mean ‘various’

Many western European languages have a perfect tense, formed by combining an auxiliary verb (meaning ‘have’ or ‘be’) with a past participle. Different languages use this verb form in different ways. A recent paper used translations of a well-known French novel to explore those differences. The aim was to see which tense the translators used… Continue reading Using translation to show how the perfect differs across languages