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 ...

A reader took issue with the title of my column two weeks ago. Inter alia, he wrote; “It is incorrect to say ‘Beware of’ . The correct usage is either “Be aware of” or just ‘Beware’. In response, I ...

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 ...

There are three basic kinds of verbs plus many subclasses. Here we cover only the three basic types. Initially, verbs are divided into main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Then auxiliary verbs are divided ...

National Public Radio recently asked listeners to submit their top grammar peeves. As usually happens when people talk about grammar, control-freak impulses nearly steered the conversation off course, ...

Both Zbyszek from Poland and Iqbal Ahmad from Pakistan write that they find it difficult to differentiate between transitive and intransitive verbs: 'Please explain the difference and give us some ...

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 ...