The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Formal letters differ in some key ways from e-mail and even from professional memos. The purpose of a formal letter is often serious: It may be a formal application for a job, a formal statement of a ...

Language learning is often a daunting prospect. Many of us wish we had learned a language to a higher level at school. But even though adults of all ages can do well in acquiring a new language, fear ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...

Two concepts – acquisition and learning – play key roles in the study of language. Although there are people who use the two terms interchangeably, in reality they embody two different processes in ...