Words And Rules: The Ingredients Of Language - Hardcover

Pinker, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465072690 ISBN 13: 9780465072699

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

Who other than MIT scientist Steven Pinker could explore a single linguistic phenomenon - the use of irregular verbs - from the vantage points of psychology, biology, history, philosophy, linguistics, and child development?In Words and Rules , Pinker answers questions about the miraculous human ability called language and does it in the gripping, witty style of his other bestsellers. As the stories unfold, the reader is immersed in the evolution of the English language over the centuries, the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics, the simulation of neural networks on computers, the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak, the tragic loss of language from neurological disease, and more illustrations using humorous wordplay than anyone would have thought possible. Pinker makes sense of all these phenomena with the help of a single powerful idea: that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.Pinker is well known for his skills of explaining the art and science of language. His bestselling book How the Mind Works was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was the #1 bestselling book for amazon.com in 1997. His other bestseller The Language Instinct was named one of the Ten Best Books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review and nominated for the William James Book Award by the American Psychological Association.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Pinker is Professor in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

MIT linguist Pinker builds on his previous successes (How the Mind Works; The Language Instinct) with another book explaining how we learn and deploy word, phrase and utterance. Some linguists (notably Noam Chomsky) have argued that everything in speech comes from hidden, hard-wired rules. Others (notably some computer scientists) claim that we learn language by association, picking up raw data first. Pinker argues that our brains exhibit both kinds of thought, and that we can see them both in English verbs: rule application ("combination") governs regular verbs, memory ("lookup") handles irregulars. The interplay of the two characterizes all language, perhaps all thought. Each of Pinker's 10 chapters takes up a different field of research, but all 10 concern regular and irregular forms of words. Pinker shows what scientists learn from children's speech errors (My brother got sick and pukeded); from survey questions (What do you call more than one wug?); from similar rules in varying languages (English, German and Arapesh); from theoretical models and their failings and from brain disorders like jargon anomia (whose victims use complex sentences, but say things like "nose cone" when they mean "phone call"). Sometimes Pinker explains linguists' current consensus; at other times, he makes a case for his own theoretical school. His previous books have been accused of excessive ambition; here he largely sticks to his own fields. The result, with its crisp prose and neat analogies, makes required reading for anyone interested in cognition and language. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable," Pinker writes. "That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student." It is serious linguistic business that he is about, but what fun he has with it! Turning languages (mostly English) inside out, upside down and backward, he seeks to show through the way people say things something of how the mind works. Many of the speakers are children as they go about mastering their language and in so doing come up with such constructions as "I buyed a fire dog for a grillion dollars." Pinker, author of the best-selling How the Mind Works (1997), is professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Musing on the "boundless expressive power" of language, he asks what the trick is behind our ability to fill one another's heads with so many different ideas. The premise of this fascinating 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." The word-and-rule theory, he says, "has solved many puzzles about the English language, and has illuminated the ways that children learn to talk, the forces that make languages diverge and the forces that make them alike, the way that language is processed in the brain, and even the nature of our concepts about things and people."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

For more than a dozen years, Pinker (brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) has conducted experimental studies of human linguistic behavior and pondered the nature of language and its relation to the brain. He has thereby contributed voluminously to scientific literature in the still youthful field of cognitive science. In recent years, much of his time in the lab as well as theoretical analysis has focused on a single phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs. By attacking this phenomenon from a wide variety of disciplines, Pinker enters some of the great debates about how the brain processes language. In explaining how language works and how we learn it, he summarizes current research and competing theoretical models in an extremely readable and enjoyable style. With this title and with his previous ones, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Pinker joins Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as one of the great popularizers of modern science.
-Paul A. D'Alessandro, Portland P.L., ME
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465072690
• ISBN 13: 9780465072699
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368