Synopsis
An examination of the human ability to use language by an MIT professor traces the history and evolution of the English language, the theories of Noam Chomsky, the way children learn to use language, and much more. Reprint.
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Review
Steven Pinker has a very good ear; you know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules, Pinker picks apart our language to reveal pro found truths about how we think.
Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.
English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tenses that look like the present-tense verb with "-ed" on the end--today I walk, yesterday I walked, etc. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular past tenses follow no rules--today I buy, but yesterday I bought; today I hold, yesterday I held.
The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving this is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.
It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon Ings
Review
"[An excellent work of popular science."--Thomas Nagel, The New Republic
"the book provides a scholarly, persuasive, enjoyable, and eminently readable account of important language phenomena."--Nature
"Compelling and revelatory."--Guardian
"An intellectual joyride."--Globe and Mail
"Not only does Pinker breathe life into the topic, he makes the reading breathtakingly exciting."--Montreal Gazette
"A fascinating voyage of discovery."--Sunday Telegraph
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Words and Rules : The Ingredients of Language
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HarperCollins Publishers, 2000
ISBN 10: 0060958405
ISBN 13: 9780060958404
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