Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Shakespearean English difficult for us to follow and Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Why do languages have so many quirks and irregularities? Are they all fundamentally alike? How are new words created? Where in the brain does language reside?

In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker answers these and many other questions. His new book shares the wit and style of his classic, The Language Instinct, but explores language in a completely different way. In this book, Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That phenomenon – the existence of regular and irregular verbs – connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the attempts to duplicate human language using computer simulations; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the peculiarities of the English language; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain.

Pinker makes sense of all of this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules. It is a distinction that extends beyond language and offers insight into the very nature of the human mind. Words and Rules is a sparkling, eye-opening, and utterly original book by one of the world's leading cognitive scientists.

Steven Pinker is Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of the Technology.