DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...

An "infinitive" in English is a verb preceded by the word to, as in to study. Many English verbs can be followed by a grammatical structure that contains an infinitive and is known as an "infinitive ...

The imperative is a verb form that is used to give orders, instructions, advice, encouragement etc. It's formed by using the ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary what you find is the verb in the infinitive form. In English it’s two words - ‘to swim’ - but in German it’s just the one schwimmen. In German, there’s a ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

Language Acquisition, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007), pp. 75-113 (39 pages) This article focuses on the meaning of nonfinite clauses ("root infinitives") in Dutch and English child language. I present ...

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: ...

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 ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary you find the infinitive form.‎ In English it’s made up of two words: to swim. ‎ But in French it’s just one, nager. ‎ And if you want to say something more ...

JUST why the split, cleft, gashed, hashed, or mangled infinitive should have become the rallying point it is for contempt and fury — on both sides of the argument — it is hard to say. Possibly the ...