Humans are storytelling beings. As far as we know, no other species has the capacity for language and ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. From our earliest days, we name and describe things.

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 ...

There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is ...

Latest issue of New Scientist has an interview with Noam Chomsky on, language, human nature, social media and politics, as well as a little photo gallery. Excerpt here, the full thing is online, you ...

This article exemplifies Language-Internal Explanation. It seeks to document and to explain the inability of Russian impersonal clauses to be infinitival. We argue that this gap is the consequence of ...

Where did language come from? Not evolution, Tom Wolfe argues in his new book, which attempts to refute Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. (Mark Seliger) Jerry A. Coyne is professor emeritus in the ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it’s difficult to prove a negative like this because we’ll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...