Some smart teen-agers, backed by academic linguists, believe that, far from being incoherent, "like" is used in several precise and rather predictable ways.

In one camp are the descriptivists, academic linguists like himself.

His work has long been written off by academic linguists, who are more concerned with how language is used than with how it should be used.

These counts are not particularly accurate for a wide variety of reasons, and academic linguists are reluctant to cite them.

An academic linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky first achieved fame for his work as a political activist during the 1960s and 1970s.

Before Deborah Tannen made her mark in her field in the 1980's, academic linguists primarily studied the sound, syntax and history of language.

This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977, through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978.

The majority of academic linguists do not agree.

This reading of the word "creole" was rejected by the Australian academic linguist Roland Sussex who could find no basis for this claim.

A well-developed project, it received favourable reviews from several academic linguists but achieved little practical success.