What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, ...

I was recently browsing (I’ll tell you why some other time) in my long-neglected copy of The Basis and Essentials of German by Charles Duff and Richard Freund (Thomas Nelson, London, third edition ...

Linguistic structures comprise the organised systems by which human languages encode form and meaning. At the phonological level, inventories of sounds or gestures combine according to ...

A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from the Americas, Africa and Asia-Pacific has been published by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for ...

Over the past 10 years, the subject of grammatical complexity has attracted significant global interests. The present study employs the Register-Functional approach, shedding light on grammatical ...

A new world atlas of colonial-era languages reveals massive traces of African and Pacific source languages. A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from ...

This news release is available in German. A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from the Americas, Africa and Asia-Pacific has been published by ...

(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers with Leiden University in The Netherlands has found via experimentation that at least two types of birds are able to learn the rules that define abstract grammatical ...

With friends, family, and romantic partners, we have much to tell and hear. What we communicate, however, depends not only on the content of what we say but also on the structure. In particular, ...