Tag: morphology

September 25, 2012

It’s All Grammar—So What?

It’s a frequent complaint among linguists that laypeople use the term grammar in such a loose and unsystematic way that it’s more or less useless. They say that it’s overly broad, encompassing many different types of rules, and that it allows people to confuse things as different as syntax and spelling. They insist that spelling, […]

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Grammar, Semantics, Usage, Words 9 Replies to “It’s All Grammar—So What?”
August 7, 2008

The Newest Fangled Backformation

The other day at work I came across a fantastic formation I’d never seen before: “newest fangled.” It was from a speech given back in 1938 by J. Reuben Clark at Brigham Young University, where the law school is named for him. The speech was pretty formal and serious, so I’m not sure if I […]

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Words 2 Replies to “The Newest Fangled Backformation”
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