Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

At least until very recently, the human brain was a black box. The only way we could see how it worked, was to look at how people acted--and listen to what they said.

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 profound 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 tense forms that look like the present-tense verb with -ed on the end. Today I walk,yesterday I walked. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular pasts follow no rules. Today I buy, but yesterday Ibought. 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 it 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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

For more than a dozen years, Pinker (brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) has conducted experimental studies of human linguistic behavior and pondered the nature of language and its relation to the brain. He has thereby contributed voluminously to scientific literature in the still youthful field of cognitive science. In recent years, much of his time in the lab as well as theoretical analysis has focused on a single phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs. By attacking this phenomenon from a wide variety of disciplines, Pinker enters some of the great debates about how the brain processes language. In explaining how language works and how we learn it, he summarizes current research and competing theoretical models in an extremely readable and enjoyable style. With this title and with his previous ones, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Pinker joins Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as one of the great popularizers of modern science.
-Paul A. D'Alessandro, Portland P.L., ME
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

The author of }The Language Instinct{ and }How The Mind Works{ ranges across a vast spectrum of topics by focussing on just regular and irregular verbs. "The Oliver Sacks of words" }Spectator{. "Rightly called the only linguist who can write readable prose, and if there is anybody who can make irregular verbs gripping, it is he" Matt Ridley. Pheonix }Superlead{. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

One of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Steven Pinker is the author of seven books, including How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate—both Pulitzer Prize finalists and winners of the William James Book Award. He is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a frequent contributor to Time and the New York Times.