Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...

The goal of my video project for the course Language in US Society, embedded above, was to emphasize how the meaning of words -especially slang - have adapted beyond having only one meaning through ...

The death of Joan Didion, the most profound essayist about language since George Orwell, comes at a time when one of her most astute observations — that words have meaning and consequences — is being ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...