Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language Reviews

• Boxes and Arrows for the next Millennium

  
  By A3SYHALCWZ8GOA on 2000-02-06
  If The Language Instinct described Pinker's view of the development of language and How the Mind Works described his views about cognition in general, this latest work details his ideas about the cognitive organization of language. And like his other books, Pinker tries to persuade the reader to agree with his assessment of thingsusing humorous examples, occasionally odd logic, hyperbole, and in this case a 290 page extended example.

  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.
  
  

• focused, interesting book

  
  By on 1999-10-25
  I rank this book ahead of How the Mind Works and behind the Language Instinct, but all three were quite informative and enjoyable. Pinker has returned to his core compentency- linguistics. May be a little too narrow for those looking for another philosophy of mind tome.
  
  

• Language is Fun? Language is Fun!

  
  By A3RSSSR7340J75 on 2000-02-10
  Whoever would think that an entire book could be written on the subject of verbs: regular and irregular. But Pinker does a dynamic job of making language sing. He recognizes the liquidity of language, its morphing and morphosis of rules, and its complete fascination. This is the third Pinker book I have read - and can't wait for the next one. I jumped into this one expecting repetition from his other books, but he continues to surprise us with completely new slants about language, completely new examples. Only his expertise and broad sense of humor remain familiar. I have to read slowly so I can absorb all the nuances suggested. Still, I hate to lay the book down. Major entertainment and fascinating information.
  
  

• Very informative

  
  By A2ZWRWBCFPUVK3 on 2000-08-23
  If you read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" already you will probably enjoy reading this book. I think this book is somewhat harder to read, though, because of its topic. This book mainly deals with regular and irregular verbs. Yikes! Irregular verbs are a nightmare for students - especially if they are learning a foreign language. Believe me, my native language is German and I really hated having to learn all those weird combinations like "go - went - gone". Where does that come from? I have to admit that German is not much better - in fact, Pinker deals with the German language in a full chapter.

  I always wondered why the verbs we most frequently use are so ridiculously irregular. Why not "go - goed - goed"? Wouldn't that be easier? Pinker goes (why "goes"?) through many irregular verbs and explains in full detail where the funky endings come from - it turns out that most of the endings come from old or ancient sources. This part is a little bit dull to read if you're not really thrilled by all the subtleties but it is still very nice to see why the most commonly used verbs are irregular.

  PS: I fear having read though all the wrong examples Pinker gives scrod up my knowledge of irregular verbs somewhat. I will ask my friends to blame it on him. ;-)
  
  

• A Great Work (Written in an Irritating Style)

  
  By A3OEUPD9N7B9WK on 2000-03-14
  Steve Pinker is one of the top minds in psychology--his thinking is principled but empirically grounded, his explanations are simple but true to the facts, his theories are imaginative but utterly testable. On any topic he's discussing, one always gets the sense from Pinker that that issue is just one piece of an entire clockwork of knowledge.

  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.
  
  

• Mystery of mind revealed through language
  By A2CZQJX3V1VKNQ on 2002-10-10
  This is the first Pinker's book I've read; this may or may not be the best choice. In a flush of serendipity, I started finding references to Dr. Pinker and his works elsewhere; turns out he is considered one of the pivotal figures of modern evolutionary psychology and an archenemy of New Age, feminist and other postmodern, erm, thinkers. That alone could have driven me to his works; but I stumbled upon this book by pure chance, and I am very glad I did.

  "Words and rules", as its title suggests, is a less ambitious and more technical book than "The Language Instinct" or "How the Mind Works". It is likely to produce less controversy. It is less than friendly for readers without background in linguistics. There are very few far-reaching conjectures - most of the stories Pinker recounts are solid, scientifically verified data.

  However, the consequences which follow are disturbing and unusual. The seemingly trivial question of regular and irregular words in languages, and English irregular verbs in particular, has major repercussions for this other question Dr. Pinker had tackled earlier - how the mind works.

  To try to sum it up: in language acquisition and language use, humans employ two systems: memory and structure, lexicon and grammar, words and rules. They are interdependent, but distinctly separate. Their separation in human minds is illustrated by numerous examples from children's speech mistakes, speech impediments in people with various brain injuries, and neurological data, obtained by more or less direct observation of brain activity. All languages depend heavily on words; you cannot use even Esperanto unless you have mastered its basic vocabulary. As for rules, their participation in speech differs from language to language, but there is no language which does not use rules at all. People resort to rules whenever there is a failure of access to memory. For example, if you encounter a nonsense verb - "to squink" - you are much more likely to form its past tense as "squinked", not "squank", because you do not have any "squank" in your memory bank, and the regular "-ed" suffix jumps into play immediately. Pinker convincingly shows in one of the most amazing chapters of his book, that regularity does not necessarily mean statistical prevalence; true, there are many more regular verbs in English than irregulars; but in German, for example, the default plural of nouns is formed by the *least* frequent suffix, which just happens to be regular and therefore resides in the "rules" domain rather than in "words".

  No specific language is innate; no serious scholar would dispute it. Whether there are any linguistic universalia, is, as far as I understand, still debatable. Pinker's approach is, however, one step higher; it deals with the language instinct, with the innate ability to implement communication through language - and the tools which organize it into a system. It is probably more complex than the dualism of words and rules; but as a first approximation, as a working model it seems to be the step in the right - and necessary - direction.

  Why necessary? Because, as Pinker argues, now is the first time in history when we can start bridging the gap between humanities and science. Because the academic research in history, languages and literature can finally justify itself by coming closer to its ultimate, though probably misunderstood in the past, goal - to know how the mind works. That is what humanities are about; that is where they can join efforts with science to come closer to that goal.

  For me that was the central message of the book (spelled - or spelt? - out by the author in the final chapter). Jokes, cartoons and extracts from the writings of "language mavens" are never out of place, always to the point; and the jocular plurals of "harmonicae, fives and dra" left me breathless with laughter. This is a scholarly book, not light reading; and if you treat it as such, you'd see it for the marvellous achievement it is.
  
  

• Difficult read, one suspects this book is much ado...
  By AIWDGRTLV7IQF on 2001-01-30
  One suspects that this book by Steven Pinker is worthy of a long paper, even two, but that it has been extended to book length through repetitive examples.

  The central insight -- that memorized words and word parts combine with a general set of rules to form the basis of language -- is repeatedly presented by Pinker as new, innovative, insightful. Pinker is a good writer, and his phrase-making abilities do make this mildly fun to read, but given the fact that most of the audience for this book consists of non-linguistic experts, one begins to wonder how much of the self-promotion is justified.

  Why does every language have a mixture of regular and irregular forms? "Each mixture arises when unique historical events -- conquest, immigration, trade, fads in speaking -- are handled by an unchanging mental tool kit, which contains a frequency and similarity-loving associative memory and a promiscuous combinatorial grammar." (page 229) This says it all -- Pinker goes on to inform us that "the human mind is a hybrid system, learning fuzzy associations and crisp rules in different subsystems". (page 279)

  These insights are interesting, but I think are far more intuitive than the author would have us believe. I also suspect that the entire book could be reduced to a twenty page article and 40 pages of foot notes. The average reader slogs through the endless grammatical examples and begins to wonder why they need to read so much to learn these excellent points.

  Linguistics is a discipline of which much is made from fine points. My own bias is that linguistics is at best an informative field, informing broader areas of philosophy, biology, genetics, and sociology. This book attempts to drive many points home while riding the one track, liguistics, and while it does inform, it also bores the reader. This is the sort of book that a better writer cites... and that a reader with general interests can safely skip.
  
  

• Word and Rules
  By A31853MCHGWDOH on 2000-01-20
  For winter break I wanted something fun to read...I intended to get Harry Potter books but got this by chance off the new books table. I have a degree in linguistics but haven't kept up with what is happening in the area. I have throughly enjoyed reading this book. The author provided plenty of background information and wonderful illustrations (and cartoons too!) to explain the points of the text. I haven't finished the book but it is going fast.

  I highly recommend it for teachers of literacy and language. There are terrific ways to explain the irregular, and for that matter regular, verbs in English. The glossary is a great, quick guide to terms in the field as well as terms in the text. This my first book by this author and I plan to read others.
  
  

• worth every penny
  By A2EKT379TIWMDY on 2001-09-27
  Pinker's Words and Rules is, in short, an awesome book worthy of the highest praise (at least, I think so). Although I do not feel I can do it justice here, hopefully I can give you enough of a hint of the book's thesis to get you interested.

  Pinker establishes from the start that the presence of regular and irregular verbs in all languages can tell us far more than one would immediately think. I must admit that, after reading Pinker's first chapter, I was rather skeptical as to how illuminating this apparently simple phenomenon could be. How can such a commonplace principle reveal some of the most integral components of human mind and language? It was a real pleasure, however, to watch my objections to Pinker's argument fall apart as I read the rest of the book.

  Briefly, Pinker traces the development of language in children and touches on many original experiments with a wide range of subjects to suggest that there is a discernible structure in our brains that accommodates the regulars and irregulars. Some (the regulars) need only be stored in root form (e.g., to talk) in our memory; our mind can inflect them appropriately (person, tense, etc.) using built-in rules of language (e.g., just add -ed to get the past tense). Other verbs (the irregulars), however, do not follow the rules; all of their forms must be stored in our lexical memory (e.g., am, are, is, was, were; although related irregulars can lead to mini-patterns that help us inflect new verbs that "seem" irregular). These principles are a shadow of the underlying structure of our minds.

  This is, of course, only a minuscule fraction of the information Pinker covers in Words and Rules. Best of all, he has a great sense of humor and a gift for writing that makes all of his ideas perfectly clear. The "knickknacks" of language he relates are all familiar, and yet he uses them brilliantly to make a strong case for the structure of our mind (not so familiar) that he believes is reflected by the principal of verb regularity and irregularity. Admittedly, Pinker becomes somewhat repetitive at times in this book, but I didn't find these lapses particularly troubling (I got the feeling that he could sense the skepticism that some of his readers would have and tried a little too hard to be convincing).

  If you have read and enjoyed How the Mind Works and/or The Language Instinct, you will certainly enjoy this book as well (if you have read The Language Instinct, then some of the ideas in Words and Rules will already be familiar to you). If you have not read Pinker yet, this is as good a place to start as any.
  
  

• Perfect for us word nerds
  By A2PAD826IH1HFE on 2000-01-27
  The thing about Steven Pinker is that he can take an esoteric subject like How the Mind Works, or 'Words and Rules', and through his wit and choice of examples, make the subject not only come alive, but charm us as well. Who would have thought that a book about irregular English verbs would be so much fun to read?
  
  
• Verbs: a window into the development of language
  By A1RTAB16JAM2D9 on 1999-12-07
  A fairly detailed account of a research study focussed on English verbs that I thought suggests the following stages in development of English grammar: noun (chimpanzee vocalizations),noun phrase1 (verbs in noun phrase, noun phrase2(verb phrase seen as special), Chomsky grammar. Grammar development was accompanied by and to some extent involved an increasing grasp of the concept of time: the older irregular verbs remain from a stage of language development in which "I go" and "I went" were treated as unrelated forms, while regular verbs standardize the way the verb is inflected to express the different time aspects of the verb as tenses.

  A model of how to make a detailed report on research that will be suitable for a broad non-specialist audience, very well written and well reported.
  
  

• An Important Dispatch From the Front Lines
  By A28WM1RZHBKLH on 2002-01-07
  This book has some quite interesting things to say about how we speak and, more generally, about how we think. It is a closely-argued defense of a certain position in psycholinguistics - namely that we process language by variously using memorized forms or applying rules. Thus we retrieve from memory the past tense "went" of "go" but figure out by rule the past tense "ambled" of "amble".

  It sounds obvious, the way I have put it. I'm not sure it is all that obvious: Pinker and those investigators of like mind have taken a middle ground in a heated debate. On one side is Chomsky, who apparently feels that associational operations that allow us, for example, to retrieve the irregular past tense from memory when we have the root word in mind are illusory, that virtually every morpheme (word form) - even those that are seemingly irregular - is evoked by a strict rule from the root. On the other side stand the connectionists, who insist that the brain's "past-tense morpheme-builder", say, is a neural network (of course it is, but they mean one of a particular kind), and that it has learned, during a person's childhood, to inflect words by building connections between input root and output past tense by getting correct versions from parents and others. In this view there are no "rules" that stand outside the network: past tenses are formed by cranking through a vast web of memory that was shaped by the linguistic facts that served to train it. And so, presumably, with other grammatical forms. (I know I have compressed excessively here: Pinker does a better job - and has pictures!)

  The first part of the book explains and elaborates these positions. Most of the rest of the book is devoted to describing experiments that take advantage of the few verbs in English that are irregular in the past tense and nouns irregular in the plural to tease out those situations in which we apply a rule versus those in which we rely on memory to come up with the appropriate word when we are speaking.

  If you can understand the previous sentence, then you will have a shot at following Pinker as he gallops off in pursuit of his Grail of Words and Rules. It's not that he is obscure or incoherent (he is an engaging writer with a light touch): rather, he is steeped in this work - has been for years - and tends to forget that the reader is not, and that the reader does not have an endless appetite for slight variations on an experimental theme that may confirm or falsify certain ideas or their competitors.

  The work Pinker describes is very much part of the current research in brain organization - not only in language performance but, as he makes persuasive, in more general sorts of cognition. It is all in the service of answering a small set of related questions, so the book has the virtue of focus. It has the additional virtue of making clear the linguistic genius of the average Joe or Jane, and further demythologizing the omniscience of the "language mavens" (a service Pinker also performed in "The Language Instinct"). When you are done you will be well-schooled in the English past tense, and probably find yourself more aware of, and in awe of, your everyday linguistic performance. It is, however, one long argument for his theory (although he does not ever formally specify the theory, we get the idea). While it does not provide the numerous epiphanies scattered through "The Language Instinct" or "How the Mind Works" this book does give the reader an excellent feel for how psychology is done these days.
  
  

• Applied linguistics
  By A1WT96X9NC0D9G on 2002-12-23
  This book may strike some as mind-blowing and some as dull, depending upon your familiarity and interest in the subject. I, for one, found it perfectly suited to my high interest in language and how the mind works. I recommend browsing the book at a local store to get a feel for it. As academic writing goes, this is hardly dry. Pinker writes lucidly and with great humor, using the idea of regular and irregular verbs (!) to explore diverse topics in modern science. I read it with hunger. A great soft introduction to linguistics, and to the nature of the human brain.
  
  
• "The irregular and regular beget each other"
  By ATPPN4F788R5L on 2004-12-26
  The above title is my personal translation and interpretation of the Chinese aphorism: _qi2 zheng4 xiang1 sheng1_ (which originally referred to using a combination of straightforward tactics and deception in war); and it encapsulates what, in my view, this book is all about.
  
  Morphology, or the way words are put together, is a slippery thing to deal with in a scholarly way. Anybody who speaks a language, inherently knows a lot about morphology. We are aware of regularities and irregularities, but are generally at a loss to say much about the things that break a seemingly established pattern (e.g. book, books; but: woman, women) other than to brush them off with a comment like "That's an exception - just memorize it." Many previous works seem to have cherished a desire to stuff morphological patterns into a mold of consistent regularity, expressing disappointment when it didn't work. But in fact irregularities, which themselves often form clusters of regularity, provide us with an intriguing glimpse into the structure of human language and the organization of the brain.
  
  Pinker's main thesis is found in brief on p. 119: "...regular and irregular inflection are psychologically, and ultimately, neurologically distinguishable...irregular inflection depends on *memorized* words or forms *similar* to them, but regular inflection can apply to *any* word, regardless of whether the word is readily retrievable from memory."
  
  Pinker adopts several different angles to gather support for his thesis, including children's grammar mistakes during acquisition of their native language, experiments with nonsense words like _wug_, elicitations of past tenses of verbs and plurals of nouns in German where there is more than one possibility (though I felt the results of these could mostly be predicted before the experiments were run), and comparisons of the past tense and plural forms of idioms vs. non-idioms (e.g. lowlife: lowlifes, not lowlives; and fly-flew-flown, but flied out, when referring to baseball). Pinker makes an interesting comparison of measure word choice in Chinese with the regular and irregular verb and plural form tangle in English. And I found the discussion of the pattern associator model (p. 134-146) enlightening.
  
  I personally wasn't that taken with Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, and I find his smart-aleck writing style grating at times. His metaphors, while colorful, are often barely this side of appropriateness, in my view. But this book is a real tour de force which reflects the long-term, deep, and wide-reaching thought that Pinker devoted to his subject. I think this book should be required reading for anybody studying morphology, or even general linguistics.
  
  
• Everything you ever wanted to know about language.
  By APD2LBS3995HU on 2000-02-20
  Pinker's Words and Rules is a throrough examination of how a mixture of grey matter, history, and logic form what we know as language. Pinker chooses to work as a true scientist, dissecting a micronism (verbs) in order to make empirical claims about the world as a whole (language). Although the casual reader will find the book lenghy and boring, anyone interested in phsychology or language will be captured by his down-to-earth analogies and strongly-supported claims. Put it on your must-read list!
  
  
• Brilliant book inappropriately marketed
  By A3U4ZQLGRFFN7O on 2006-03-31
  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.
  
  
• Wonderful
  By on 2000-06-06
  Having read Pinker's books "The Language Instinct" and "How the Mind Works", I had high expectations for this book, and it met every one of them. If you enjoyed either of those two books, this is a must-read.
  
  
• Frequently entertaining, but ridiculous as scholarship
  By AHSMB5TX4DMHY on 2004-12-10
  Steven Pinker presents a clash between his own views about language and those of his (mostly connectionist) opponents. The clash is explicitly labeled as a form of intellectual combat. Unfortunately for the opponents, they aren't really allowed to fight. Their views are perfunctorily summarized by Pinker, who then argues his own views at length. The role of judge and jury in this contest is played by Steven Pinker. And, in the end, the winner turns out to be ... (well, I wouldn't want to give away the ending!).
  
  I read this not long after taking a look at Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin makes his case stronger by giving his opponents every benefit of the doubt, then addressing all the doubts in turn. It's his modesty that makes his work so compelling.
  
  Needless to say, Pinker does have a gift for writing about language and cognitive science in a entertaining way, and (although he's not in as good form here as in his Language Instinct), there are plenty of intriguing bits throughout this volume. The book is not bad as entertainment, so long as its kangaroo-court aspect doesn't bother you.
  
  
• Losing impetus
  By A1F8GH7CR68P59 on 2001-05-25
  Several years ago I read 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker and, despite being an avid and enthusiastic reader of books about language, I was somewhat disappointed - the book seemed to lack drive or insight. These comments, however, are based on an impression which is not fresh in my mind.

  Hence, when I started reading 'Words and Rules' I had a slightly negative preconception to fight against. But I was surprised. 'Words and Rules' is both entertaining and insightful. It's discussion of the forms of past tense in English - both regular and irregular - gave me a lot to think about. It 'explained' some of those curiosities that I had wondered about for many years - 'slept' but not 'sleeped', and yet both 'learnt' and 'learned' are acceptable. Unfortunately I did become bogged down in the book as Mr Pinker uses more and more avenues of research to support his hypothesis that both words ('slept', 'learnt') and rules ('-ed' as in 'learned') are functional. Anf that rules may be modern inventions gradually displacing the much older irregular forms.

  From a philosophical point of view this book did make me reflect on how academic research often comes up with two hypotheses and so often both are proved to be partially correct. Even when they seem to be mutually exclusive, such as the wave and particle nature of light. Is it a reflection on the power of the human mind and its ability to support its hypotheses even in the face of opposing hypotheses? If that were the case, Mr Pinker is presenting no case at all. A much more revealing document would be one that took either of the two theories - words or rules - and justified it in exclusion to the other.
  
  

• Slap jaw yokel
  By A39075BAFBUGIJ on 2004-01-10
  Yes, yes this is engaging and is interesting but only for the layman or shall I say monkey. It is useless for those who have taken even a single undergrad course in linguistics. It is also ripe with misogynist anti semitic hatred. Say no to the Pink stuff.
  
  
• Pinker Does It Again
  By A1EDZSW0OEFHRP on 2000-06-14
  Well, Pinker does it again!

  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.
  
  

• Interesting and boring paradox
  By A161XDDSH7QNVW on 2006-08-25
  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.
  
  
• A Valuable Popular Linguistics Book
  By A3UAUR3ARQ84WE on 2002-01-30
  Having a 25-year-old degree in linguistics, I was pleased to read this book, refreshing my memory on some matters but for the most part showing that the field continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Focusing on a fairly narrow area ("irregular" verbs and also nouns in English and also other languages), the author presents theories to account for this aspect of language, and the experiments which tend to support or refute those theories. Not surprisingly perhaps, his own theories fare pretty well. Since the focus is somewhat narrow, I would recommend that you first read another of Pinker's language books. (The author would probably enjoy MacDonald's "Lilith" if only to add examples of glide/glode crow/crown to his collection of English irregular verbs!)
  
  
• I was boreded! (overusing the -ed rule;-)
  By A1PJY2PT6PG40P on 2006-03-01
  I didn't really dislike this book, but that was only because I'm a linguist myself. Ordinary people will more than probably find this book as dull as ditchwater. Even I considered giving up a couple of times, which is a good indication that the book wasn't really 'a gem' as the cover claimed...
  
  
• Great if you really want to learn
  By A2Z89VLSXYHNU0 on 2006-11-07
  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.
  
  

• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
• How the Mind Works
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
• The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author