Andreea S. Calude is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has a background in mathematics and linguistics and researches (spoken) grammar, language evolution, loanwords and just about any quantitative language-related question she can get data on. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Te Reo - the Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand and the co-editor of Questions About Language, with Laurie Bauer (2020).

Laurie Bauer FRSNZ is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of over twenty books including The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (2013), which won the LSA's Leonard Bloomfield Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Humanities Medal.

List of Tables

Preface

1 Introduction

2. What you must say, what you can say and what you do not say: Grammar and norm

3. Over and out: Prepositions

4. You'll never get nowhere: Double negatives

5. All the way from the Ukraine: The definite article

6. A large amount of exceptions: Countability

7. The author has finished this chapter last year: The present perfect

8. An even more interestinger topic: Comparatives and superlatives

9. I'm lovin' it: The progressive

10. The good, the bad and the ugly: Adjectives

11. What it is is a nonstandard feature: Double be construction

12. Human dogs and inhuman people: Gender and related matters

13. The chapter that I put too many pronouns in it: Shadow pronouns

14. There's heaps of money to be won: Number agreement

15. Because I'm worth it: Insubordinate clauses

16. They are cleverer than she and I: Pronominal case

17. Is that your wife again?: Possession

18. Conclusion

Glossary: Language for language

Index