Humans can create arbitrary, abstract symbols for words, and juggle them in our head to create a meaningful story or convey an emotion to others. Apes and other primates cannot. We can create ...

In this article, the latest in our “The Neuroscience of…” series, we investigate recent, leading theories about the emergence of language, the surprising phenomena that correlate with or might have ...

Harold in Clifton Park, N.Y., wrote recently to ask me about the grammar of the sentences “I couldn’t care less” and “I could care less.” Until then, I thought there were just two kinds of people in ...

Lexical semantics can be defined as ‘the study of meaning’, therefore semanticists are interested in the lexical meaning of words rather than grammatical meaning. It is not so much a practical topic ...