Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

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• In this accessible scientific work, a cognitive scientist and best-selling author of THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT and HOW THE MIND WORKS investigates human language evolution through the ages and tells how the developing mind processes, learns, and modifies language.
• "There are 348 pages in Steven Pinker's new book and they are nearly all about the past tenses of Verbs....Yet it is neither tedious nor pedantic. Pinker has rightly been called the only linguist who can write readable prose, and if there is anybody who can make irregular verbs gripping it is he. His purpose is to take verbs as a case history of how language is contained in the brain and explore it in depth....The result is a fascinating voyage of discovery."
• "At the end, even cursory readers will have a better idea of the patchwork quilt that is language, and some of the principles which underlie its patterns. They will also have a good idea of how a thorough researcher approaches a task. Like a hungry dog, Pinker chews just about every possible piece of meat off this academic bone, and licks it clean."
• The premise of this book is that there are two tricks, words and rules. They work by different principles, are learned and used in different ways, and may even reside in different parts of the brain. Their border disputes shape and reshape languages over centuries, and make language no only a tool for communication but also a medium for wordplay and poetry and an heirloom of endless fascination.
• "[T]he hype is justified; this is a very good book....It seems initially implausible that meditating on the past tense of "sing" could enable one to derive generalizations about how our mental categories "reflect the lawfulness of the world," but Pinker has done it. Hats off."
• "Despite the book's ambitious subtitle, almost all the ingredients of language are missing from it....All Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution. The testing-ground for the debate extends not only far beyond irregular verbs but even beyond language."
• "Within its limitations, as an account of recent results in linguistics Pinker's book is useful. Its big weakness is that it doesn't go far enough or deep enough."

• How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this original and totally entertaining book written in the same engaging style that illuminated his bestselling classics, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Seven Pinker explores the profound mysteries of language.

  By picking a deceptively simple phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs--Pinker connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and the humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomosky and his critics; the attempts to create language using computer simulations of neural networks; what there is to learn from children's grammatical "mistakes"; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the brain; and major ideas in the history of Western philosophy.

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  He makes sense of all this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammer of creative rules. His theory extends beyond language and offers insight in the very nature of the human mind.Human languages are capable of expressing a literally endless number of different ideas. How do we manage it--so effortlessly that we scarcely ever stop to think about it? In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, a look at the simple concepts that we use to devise works as complex as love sonnets and tax laws, renowned neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker shows us how. The latest linguistic research suggests that each of us stores a limited (though large) number of words and word-parts in memory and manipulates them with a much smaller number of rules to produce every writing and utterance, and Pinker explains every step of the way with engaging good humor.

  Pinker's enthusiasm for the subject infects the reader, particularly as he emphasizes the relation between how we communicate and how we think. What does it mean that a small child who has never heard the word wug can tell a researcher that when one wug meets another, there are two wugs? Some rule must be telling the child that English plurals end in -s, which also explains mistakes like mouses. Is our communication linked inextricably with our thinking? Pinker says yes, and it's hard to disagree. Words and Rules is an excellent introduction to and overview of current thinking about language, and will greatly reward the careful reader with new ways of thinking about how we think, talk, and write. --Rob Lightner

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