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 ...

"Please open," said the dentist, and these words gave me something to think about during the uncomfortable moments of oral inspection that followed. Because what she actually said was 開いてください (Aite ...

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.” ...

AS we took up in this column last week, intransitive verbs like "gone" and "disappear" are of the kind that can't pass on their action to a direct object. This is why sentence constructions like "The ...

If an action concerns only one person or thing, you mention only the person or thing that carries out the action (the subject) and the action itself (the verb). Verbs which describe such actions are ...

The state of Pakistan is a dystopian transformation from a noun to a verb. Ostensibly formed to protect the rights of people purportedly subsumed under the colonial and later Congress rule, the state ...

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 ...