WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

The past week witnessed the frequent occurrence of the words ‘resign’ and its derivative ‘resignation’ in the print, electronic and social media, thanks to LK Advani who stunned the BJP with his ...

When a sentence uses a transitive verb to describe an action, it’s necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” ...

There are three basic kinds of verbs plus many subclasses. Here we cover only the three basic types. Initially, verbs are divided into main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Then auxiliary verbs are divided ...

Nama, a Papuan language spoken in southern New Guinea, indexes the person and number of the A argument of a transitive verb with a suffix, and the P argument with a prefix. For a large subset of ...

Different verbs take different types of complements and assign them to various positions. Two that we will consider here are ergative and unaccusative verbs. The basic one each assign a single ...