What tools does a grammarian need? A brain helps, and so does a computer, but surely one of our most essential tools is some kind of diagramming system. How can we think about a sentence’s structure, ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which ...