A sentence must never be interpreted out of context, as any scholar knows. It is pointless, furthermore, to suggest that separate sentences are true out of a context of linguistic and nonlinguistic ...

The technology to decode our thoughts is drawing ever closer. Neuroscientists at the University of Texas have for the first time decoded data from non-invasive brain scans and used them to reconstruct ...

In the introductory chapter to their excellent corpus linguistics textbook, "The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics," Anne O'Keeffe and Michael McCarthy give a brief account of Cardinal Hugo of ...

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. To make the ...

Courts and scholars are experimenting with artificial intelligence tools to help establish the ordinary meaning of words and phrases in statutes and contracts. A tone of cautious optimism—one ...

Always the need has been to stay in the concrete, the practical, the everyday, so as to find hints of the invisible through the visible. The infinite levels in Shakespeare, for instance, make his ...

We all take language for granted, yet we rely upon it throughout our lives in order to perform a range of functions. Imagine how you would accomplish all the things you might do, even in a single day, ...