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 ...

Not long ago while editing a series of articles, I noticed that the writer had strange ideas about where to put adverbs. Many were placed before the verbs and some before the subjects, too. “He ...

TO establish context or give texture to a main clause, we typically use a phrase to modify it. This modifying phrase commonly takes one of these five forms — a prepositional phrase, appositive phrase, ...

This phrase is actually the same verb (voir) repeated twice in different forms – first as an imperative, and then as an infinitive. That’s why, to non-native French speakers, it can seem like an ...

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 ...