The new question-of-the-week is: How should we teach grammar to students? Our students need to learn grammar, but the real question is how to teach it in ways that don’t bore them out of their minds.

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 ...

Linguists are always taken aback by the overwhelmingly negative and sometimes virulently expressed reaction they get when stating something that every linguist believes (and linguists do not agree on ...