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 ...

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 ...

The distinction between “lay” and “lie” continues to fade. Almost without exception, people say, “I laid on the couch.” They never seem to say, “I lay on the couch.” Plus, people usually throw in the ...

We often see the frequent occurrence of the word resign and its derivative in the print, electronic and social media thanks to politicians who hand in resignation letters. Look at these news headlines ...

Moment-to-moment rational decisions can lead to and sustain procrastination (and many other problems like addiction). The theory of intransitive preferences explains both our seemingly irrational ...

The results of A. K. Sen and P. K. Pattanaik on sufficient conditions for the transitivity of simple majorities are extended to the case where it is not assumed that the individual's indifference ...