Sentence examples for linguists ability from inspiring English sources

The debate rests heavily on the presence or absence of certain features typical of Cushitic or Afro-Asiatic, but the lack of sufficiently representative and thoroughly researched descriptions of the Omotic languages has hampered linguists' ability to discern reliable generalizations within the group.

By contrast, a growing band - followers of the US linguist Noam Chomsky - believe this linguistic ability is inherited and passed on to us through the genes of our mothers and fathers.

Mothers are proud of the linguist abilities of their children and want them to show off.

Few linguists doubt that natural selection has played a part in humans' linguistic ability.

Or rather, that the continued vitality of the word — its unique ability to convey emphasis, relieve stress, shock grown-ups and function as adverb, noun, verb, intensifier and what linguists call "infix" — rests on its ability to mark an edge between the permissible and the profane.

Shortly before he graduated in 1941, he was recommended to Bletchley Park as a German linguist of ability by Professor Leonard Willoughby, who had himself been a codebreaker during the first world war.

Published in 1962 and long out of print, it's an authoritative but hugely entertaining introduction to the study of English and a reminder that linguists once combined scholarship with the ability to write well (a tradition that perhaps only David Crystal, who studied under Quirk, continues today).

Because not enough soldiers speak foreign languages, the military has had to rely on more than 10,000 civilian contract linguists, many local Afghans and Iraqis of widely differing abilities.

Counterterrorism officials say they have already taken strong steps to bolster their intelligence and analysis abilities, including the hiring and training of more agents, analysts and linguists, as well as the opening of a joint terrorism center run out of the C.I.A.

Linguists love this sort of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability to parse sentences correctly.

That ability can be reactivated with the proper amount of language input right up until puberty, a stage linguists refer to as the critical period.