When people were confronted with verbed nouns (in sentences such as ”I was not supposed to go there alone: You said you would companion me.”) EEGs measured their brains recognizing a syntactic anomaly, but not a semantic one. In other words, the subjects understood--in a time measured in milliseconds--that something cool and new was happening. And they immediately got what it meant.
Coming soon: a neurological explanation for why a bitter few really, really hate it when you verb a noun.
[via pourmecoffee]
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