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 ...

Nama, a Papuan language spoken in southern New Guinea, indexes the person and number of the A argument of a transitive verb with a suffix, and the P argument with a prefix. For a large subset of ...

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 ...