Ellen Jovin is the author of “Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips From a Roving Grammarian” and cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication-skills consulting firm.

After applying advanced evolutionary modeling techniques, the researchers report that about one-third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals”—patterns believed to exist across all languages—show ...

Abstract: The potential of current machine translation (MT) of natural languages is discussed by comparing the output of embedded structure sentence, ambiguous sentence and garden path sentence. The ...

Emphases mine to make a point. "This suggests models absorb both meaning and syntactic patterns, but can overrely...." No, LLMs do not "absorb meaning," or anything like meaning. Meaning implies ...

In the Paris example, if the researchers were testing proper responses based on syntax, why did they posit that "France" is the correct response to "Can you tell me where to find Paris?"? The correct ...

In a recent study published in Communications Psychology, researchers from NYU led by Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU Tandon and Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine Adeen ...

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

The film follows a young student named Jimmy as he learns about sentences in school. Through various examples, he discovers the difference between telling sentences, which end with a period, and ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

Have you ever wondered how the words we choose and the way we string sentences together impact what we’re trying to say? When it comes to writing and speaking, word choice and sentence structure, also ...