DIFFERENT OFFER (this item listed here is DIFFERENT from the title and/or picture above. Please see description & pictures by BookGems before placing an order): Edition Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Second Impression, 1999. ISBN: 978-0-297-81647-8. HARDBACK. 362 pages, size: 16.4 x 24 x 3 cm. Just light tan to paper edges. Other than that, the unread book remains in excellent condition throughout: dust cover intact; green cloth hard cover bright with gilt lettering on spine; text all clean, neat and tight. Prompt dispatch from UK.

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

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