Words And Rules (SCIENCE MASTERS) - Softcover

Pinker, Prof Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753810255 ISBN 13: 9780753810255

Publisher: W&N, 2001

Synopsis

One of the world's science superstars presents a brilliantly illuminating, entertaining and cutting-edge account of how language actually works.

How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven 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 illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; 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.

About this title

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

Edition details

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0753810255
• ISBN 13: 9780753810255
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 410