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 ...

This question originally appeared on Quora. Answer by Thomas Wier, assistant professor of linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi: Short Answer: Yes, but not in English. What do we mean by ...

English typically uses a strict SUBJECT VERB OBJECT (SVO) word order in simple sentences, as in Students (S) read (V) books (O). This SVO word order becomes altered in many other English sentence ...