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Brett Reynolds
Joined: May 26, 2023
Brett Reynolds teaches at Humber Polytechnic and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He's part of the team behind A Student's Introduction to English Grammar and is presently working with collaborators on a treebank project based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and on a popular linguistics book. Beyond academia, Brett bikes, swims, lifts, and reads. He also spends more time than intended editing Wikipedia.
The connections between words aren’t always as straightforward as the link between ‘run’ and ‘runner’; often, figuring them out requires the subtle unraveling of linguistic evolution, the kind of detective work that makes etymology so fascinating.
Not everyone gives directions the way you do—in fact, the way people tell others how to get where they want to go can vary by city, town, and culture. Some of these directional systems might just change how you navigate the world.
A 2019 study of scientists over-wintering in Antarctica revealed subtle but measurable changes in the participants’ speech.
If you've ever felt that English could use a couple more tenses to truly capture the nuances of the past, present, and future, this exploration of languages that have taken verb tenses to fascinating new heights is for you.
Linguistic illusions—a phenomenon in which your judgment or understanding of a sentence or phrase conflicts with its actual meaning or structure—reveal how we process the world, and remind us that things aren’t always as they seem.