Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

Poeppel

Pinker unpacks a remarkable variety of facts associated with the distinction between regular and irregular English words and their structure. If you like (English) words and want to know why they are put together in the way they are, this book is defintely for you.
— Nature

Brian Gardner

With its many interesting examples of how language works, Words and Rules is certainly worth reading and pondering.
— Wall Street Journal

Publishers Weekly

MIT linguist Pinker builds on his previous successes (How the Mind Works; The Language Instinct) with another book explaining how we learn and deploy word, phrase and utterance. Some linguists (notably Noam Chomsky) have argued that everything in speech comes from hidden, hard-wired rules. Others (notably some computer scientists) claim that we learn language by association, picking up raw data first. Pinker argues that our brains exhibit both kinds of thought, and that we can see them both in English verbs: rule application ("combination") governs regular verbs, memory ("lookup") handles irregulars. The interplay of the two characterizes all language, perhaps all thought. Each of Pinker's 10 chapters takes up a different field of research, but all 10 concern regular and irregular forms of words. Pinker shows what scientists learn from children's speech errors (My brother got sick and pukeded); from survey questions (What do you call more than one wug?); from similar rules in varying languages (English, German and Arapesh); from theoretical models and their failings and from brain disorders like jargon anomia (whose victims use complex sentences, but say things like "nose cone" when they mean "phone call"). Sometimes Pinker explains linguists' current consensus; at other times, he makes a case for his own theoretical school. His previous books have been accused of excessive ambition; here he largely sticks to his own fields. The result, with its crisp prose and neat analogies, makes required reading for anyone interested in cognition and language. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

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 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Pinker (psychology, MIT) explains the mysteries of language, such as why languages change over time and how children learn their native language, by dissecting the idea that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules. Pinker connects a remarkable number of topics such as the attempts to simulate language using computers; the nature of human concepts; the peculiarities of the English language; and the theories of Noam Chomsky, through a minute dissection of the phenomenon of regular and irregular verbs. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul O. Williams

This book will be of interest to anyone fascinated by language, anyone who relishes multiple examples of each notion of its workings, anyone with the time and patience to move slowly through it, enjoying its delights on the way.
— The Christian Science Monitor