Sometime ago, a student in Cambodia preparing for a special English-language scholarship test sent me an e-mail expressing puzzlement over these two sentences: "Particularly unfortunate was my failure ...

Voice is a grammatical category, an operator, that has no directly link to conceptual structure. Voice is a complex issue, but it appears to mark a prominent object that the speaker chooses to make ...

IN last week's column, we looked at how inverted sentences allow us to abandon the normal subject-verb-complement (S-V/C) sequence so we can deliver the verb or its complement wherever we feel it can ...

Ajay plays the big, black grand piano. Teagan watches television. Some verbs do not need an object to make sense. These either: Work alone, as in, ‘Connor screamed.’ Describes a ‘state’ as in, ‘Maire ...