There are two striking features of language that any scientific theory of this quintessentially human behavior must account for. The first is that we do not all speak the same language. This would be ...

The mind appears to have a consistent way of organizing an event that defies the order in which subjects, verbs, and objects typically appear in languages, according to research at the University of ...

Figure 2: Summary of evolutionary dependencies in word order for four language families. Dryer’s study of the Greenberg word-order universals 4 across a world-wide sample of related and unrelated ...

What form did the first human language take? According to some linguists, all known languages descend from a proto-language, perhaps dating back to the first behaviourally modern humans 50,000 years ...

Grammar is the system for organising a language. All major languages have a grammatical structure. Grammar allows us to structure our sentences and even our thoughts and ideas. Some experts think that ...

If Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush’s, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal ...

Find out more about how linguists research Syntax through looking at some example research. Even if animals were able to do this, we would encounter another problem as to how to interpret these new ...

For the best experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Among other things, English language learners are taught in the formative stages of ...