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 ...

AS we should all know by now, intransitive verbs are handicapped by their inability to take a direct object. Another way of saying this is that a subject cannot perform the action of intransitive ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. When a journalism professor gave students the sentence “He snapped to attention only when a tourist asked directions,” a ...

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 ...

A refereed publication, The Modern Language Journal is dedicated to promoting scholarly exchange among teachers and researchers of all modern foreign languages and English as a second language. This ...