Words and Rules : The Ingredients of Language

How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this original and totally entertaining book written in the same engaging style that illuminated his bestselling classics, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Seven Pinker explores the profound mysteries of language.

By picking a deceptively simple phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs--Pinker connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and the humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomosky and his critics; the attempts to create language using computer simulations of neural networks; what there is to learn from children's grammatical "mistakes"; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the brain; and major ideas in the history of Western philosophy. He makes sense of all this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammer of creative rules. His theory extends beyond language and offers insight in the very nature of the human mind.

Human languages are capable of expressing a literally endless number of different ideas. How do we manage it--so effortlessly that we scarcely ever stop to think about it? In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, a look at the simple concepts that we use to devise works as complex as love sonnets and tax laws, renowned neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker shows us how. The latest linguistic research suggests that each of us stores a limited (though large) number of words and word-parts in memory and manipulates them with a much smaller number of rules to produce every writing and utterance, and Pinker explains every step of the way with engaging good humor.

Pinker's enthusiasm for the subject infects the reader, particularly as he emphasizes the relation between how we communicate and how we think. What does it mean that a small child who has never heard the word wug can tell a researcher that when one wug meets another, there are two wugs? Some rule must be telling the child that English plurals end in -s, which also explains mistakes like mouses. Is our communication linked inextricably with our thinking? Pinker says yes, and it's hard to disagree. Words and Rules is an excellent introduction to and overview of current thinking about language, and will greatly reward the careful reader with new ways of thinking about how we think, talk, and write. --Rob Lightner

Displaying 1 to 5 of 29 total reviews (Page 1 of 6):

My head still hurts

I have long been a Steven Pinker fan. It is great to have a neurologist appear who can explain the workings of the brain in a fairly easy to understand, often humorous and precise way. Words & Rules, though made my head hurt. I felt a little like the rat in Flowers for Algernon: a vague feeling that I might have understood this more easily at one time not too long ago, but boy is this difficult to wade through now. Which is to say I blame myself rather than Pinker. I think it's a very difficult subject and my tenuous grasp of grammar didn't help. Unlike his previous books, an actual understanding of the parts of speech helps here.

That said, delving into the minutiae of how the brain works is ultimately rewarding, even if I only understood maybe 75% of this. Watching vicariously as Pinker et al close in how how we think and talk is truly awesome. I find myself paying close attention to how I speak; how I hesitate in choosing words; what associations I seem to need to find a word or person... . Very cool, though you can probably get sucked into some kind of fugue state if you overdo it.

Still highly recommended, but make sure you're snowed in somewhere and have a lot of coffee.

George

Great if you really want to learn

I am a linguist now, but I read this book before I started graduate school and I really enjoyed it! The other reviewers are correct in that it is more dense, but if you are really curious about how inflection and irregular verbs (not to mention coinages such as 'computer mouses/mice' or 'flew/flied out to right field') might work in the brain, I think you might really enjoy it! For those who say it's dull, well it's the fascinating topic that makes it good, not a storyline! It is, after all, an informational book. I recommend it for serious language hobbyists or people wanting to enter linguistics in the future.

Interesting and boring paradox

I have read both the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, and I'd say this one ranks below both of those. While the book is filled with very interesting facts about verbs and language acquistion, I found it too long and tedious.. I felt like I was plowing through.

For those wanting to get most of the information from this book and not "plow" - I'd read chapters 1-3 (The Infinite Library, Dissection by Linguistics, Broken Telephone) and then 7 (Kids Say the Darndest Things), and then 10 (A Digital Mind in an Analog World). Readers taking this approach can skim the other chapters to see if they are of interest.

I found Chapter 7 to be the most interesting, as I have a young two year old acquiring language. Naturally, I'd like to have seen that section expanded. That chapter was (to me) the most revealing of the entire book.

Brilliant book inappropriately marketed

In Words and Rules, Pinker manages to condense and tie together an unbelievable amount of research. Reading this book carefully (i.e. really absorbing the densely packed information) and looking up some of its references is probably equivalent to a good undergraduate degree in linguistics.

Pinker has a knack for teasing apart all the different threads that make up a hugely complex subject, exploring each one with arguments and data from different academic currents, and then tying them up again so the reader can form a much better picture of the whole. And that's exactly what he does in this flawlessly well-written book.

The only problem with Words and Rules is its packaging: it's marketed as a popular science book for the general public, but unlike The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, it can probably only be properly appreciated by either serious "language hobbyists" or linguists (I am both).

If you don't have a fairly good background, or at least a serious interest, in linguistics, you'll probably find this book too dense (at any rate, it's definitely not "light reading"). If you're a linguist (pure or applied), here's another real gem from Steven Pinker.

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