Determiners are a new part of speech. Yes, you read that correctly: while the English language and its speakers cannot come up with a singular gender-neutral pronoun, linguists and grammar experts have managed to invent a whole new category of grammatical function in the last century. How is this possible? How had it not been
The English language is constantly changing. New words are created and old words fall into disuse. Australians start to speak and write differently from Canadians; New Zealanders use the language differently from Singaporeans. And to cope with these changes, grammar rules themselves change. For speakers of some other languages, the fact that the ‘rules’ of
J.R.R. Tolkien, the professor of languages more famous for being the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings, was fascinated by the idea of dragons from an early age. When he was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember almost nothing about it except a philological
The parts of speech is simply the term used to describe the group of functions that words carry out in speech and writing. One of the hardest things to cope with in English is the fact that most of the ‘rules’ aren’t black and white, and it can hard to pin exact answers to any