Pointless Vocabulary Diversity and Grammatical Structure

By Geoffrey Pullum. I was recently browsing (I’ll tell you why some other time) in my long-neglected copy of The Basis and Essentials of German by Charles Duff and Richard Freund (Thomas Nelson, London, third edition 1945), and a polemical section in the introduction happened to catch my eye. It was a tirade against the practices of language teachers and examination compilers with regard to vocabulary range. More...