Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language [Taschenbuch]

This is one damn fine book dealing with important issues of not only linguistics, but even deeper concepts of how our brains fundamentally work! Using the whole concept of irregular-regular verbs as a entre to his topic, Pinker explore so many interesting paths. As an amateur linguist, I found this book a tour de force. It's not only informative and intriguing, but also funny.

I was deeply impressed by Pinker's THE LANGUAGE INSTICT, and this book followed right in that tradition.

Never have Pinker's virtues been more evident than in "Words and Rules." From his masterful treatment of the devoicing rule to his explanation of why compounds do and do not contain plurals to what we should *really* be learning from child language errors, Pinker teaches us what language use tells us about the mind.

Given the quality of Pinker's argument, it is unfortunate that Pinker's writing style has become almost a parody of itself. Where the "Language Instinct" treated the reader to a few irreverant allusions and lively examples, "Words and Rules" bogs down the logic of the argument with so many popular attention-getting examples (which will be unintelligible in a decade) that it is difficult to see the forest for the tacky billboards. How many examples of overregularization do we really need? When fretting over having *two* mental mechanisms rather than one (who but a monist would care?), do we need to know how the poet Empson described the Latin philosopher Lucretius? The result is a hodgepodge of equally superfluous erudition and showmanship, like a professor trying to impress the kids in the first row while keeping the kids in the back of the class awake.

A book this good doesn't need to be hucked.

Pinker believes that the brain's representation of language is rule based - morphology (such as adding -s to a noun to make it plural or -ed to a verb to make it past tense) occurs because a system in the brain applies a rule during language production. During the past twenty years or so, many cognitive scientists have begun to think that perhaps this type of morphology is not rule based at all, but instead occurs because of the specific pattern of connections in the brain. The goal of this book is to convince the reader that connectionism is wrong, and a rule based system is correct. To do this, he talks about irregular verbs; their etymology bastardization by children, idiosyncrasies, and production by non-typical populations. I never thought that irregular verbs and oddly plauralized nouns could be interesting. I was right. This topic is so much more esoteric than his other books, that even his entertaining examples could not overcome either my skepticism or my boredom. After a while you just want to hear something different. Pinker is not reporting a phenomena, and evenhandedly evaluating various explanatory theories; he is presenting one view to be dismantled, and another to be exalted as correct. But giving selective evidence could bias his readers towards his view, and I am not convinced I was given a chance to really evaluate the competing theories. I anxiously await the rebuttal by the connectionist school.

If you have read Pinker's popular books before, I can only say that this book is not at the same level. Its scope is much narrower, and its subject matter a bit more technical. That being said, if you love Pinker's way of presenting material, you will not be disappointed. If you haven't read Pinker before, I recommend that you start with one of his other books - they truly live up to their reputations.