Author: Syelle Graves
Syelle Graves
Syelle Graves has a PhD in linguistics and is the assistant director of ILETC (Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context). She was also a 40 under Forty alumni award honoree at SUNY New Paltz. You can find her at click this.
The word “unique” means “one of a kind,” but the way people use it has been shifting. For example, here are some real-life sentences from British and American speakers: “She is completely unique.” (That comes from a video describing the then-star of the Royal Ballet in London) or “It needs to be more unique than that.” (Listen for that in the film “Inception”), or even “…most uniquely,” which comes from a video about Andi bags, sort of a cross between a purse and a tote bag. In all three examples, the word “unique” has been modified, either by an intensifier adverb (“completely” as in “completely unique”)…
Language impairment is often caused by tragic conditions like aphasia, a type of brain damage. This condition can teach us a lot about how language works. To begin to understand such a complex, fascinating, and ever-changing field, we will first talk about the human brain and the field devoted to its study. What Is neurolinguistics? Neurolinguistics is a branch of neuroscience whose goal is to understand the neural aspects of language, such as how the brain processes language. To do research in neurolinguistics, neuroscientists depend largely on impaired language data, not normal language data. In other words, analyzing the patterns…
Language is one of the most remarkable characteristics that separates humans from other animals. Despite the many remarkable abilities of non-human animals, and despite the hopes and dreams of many animal lovers, animals do not have language like humans do—but they do have basic ways of communicating with each other, which we’ll explore later in the episode. In addition, no animal is able to acquire human language. Like many urban legends, such myths are widespread! Let’s start with a few animal communication systems; then, with what makes human languages different; and finally, we’ll explain why no animal has been able…
Today’s episode is about parts of speech and the interesting gray area between prepositions and adverbs. Let’s start with the help section of the Grammar Girl Grammar Pop game, which has this rule about labeling parts of speech: “Sometimes, words you might think of as prepositions act like adverbs. When a word such as over or up is modifying a verb, it’s acting like an adverb, but in Grammar Pop we still call it a preposition. Grammar Pop calls the words in the following sentences prepositions: She needed to speak up. The statue tipped over. “It’s the difference between…
What is different about words like bread, desk, and sword compared to words like burrito, bureau, and karaoke? If you said that the second set of words comes from other languages, you were right. The process is called “borrowing,” and it happens when one language adds a word (or sometimes a short sound sequence) from another language into its own “lexicon” (that means “word collection/inventory in a language.”) Linguists also call these words “loanwords,” although both terms are pretty funny, because we certainly don’t give them back! All languages borrow words from other languages; this process is part of the…
Readers often write in to complain about starting a sentence with so, even suggesting that it sounds condescending. Anand Giridharadas of the New York Times agrees that there can be a “logical tinge to so… Compared to well and um, starting a sentence with so uses the whiff of logic to relay authority.” The Telegraph informally confirms this feeling too, claiming that it may sometimes “send the wrong message: It could alienate colleagues who believe they’re being spoken down to when they hear it.” One inquirer on the English Language and Usage site asks, “Am I the only one who…