The very obliviousness to the details of the verb that makes a rule so powerful can let it blindly jam a suffix onto the end of an inhospitable sound. The result can be an uneuphonious tongue-twister such as edited or sixths. Monstrosities like these are never found among the irregulars, which all have standard Anglo-Saxon word sounds such as grew and strode and clung, which please the ear and roll off the tongue.

Much as in, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker wields his colossal knowledge of language to pick apart and establish some modicum of rules and structure in the English language. His main target is how we mentally handle regular and irregular verbs. How do we change freeze to froze, or find to found? What's going on in our brains? How do people, especially children, cope with encountering new irregular verbs?

Let's face it - linguistics is boring, yet somehow Pinker keeps it fresh by constantly dropping fun bits of linguistic knowledge, pulling for all sorts of unexpected sources. Even so - he does continue to go back to many of the same irregular verbs (though in different contexts) over and over to drive home his points.

For such a dull subject, Words and Rules is actually quite the page turner, especially in the first half of the book. Chapters like, The Horrors of the German Language really help us understand how bad a language can be and help us appreciate that English, bad as it is in those dark, irregular corners, is actually a rather good language (from a rule-following standpoint). There is so much here to learn about your language if you are an English speaker, and this may even spark your interest in linguistics.

I thought many of the discussed concepts were clever and interesting. Overall, it was a bit tedious to read though.

Excellent book. Really enjoyed the discussion on language processing and development.

Interesting, but very dry.

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

I enjoy reading Steven Pinker's popular non-fiction (see here, here, here). This one I've had on my shelf for awhile; published in 1999, I picked up this UK edition on the $3.98 remainder table at Barnes & Noble a few years later. Finally percolated to the top of the cybernetic to-be-read pile.

Pinker's research area is broad: roughly, how language is processed and generated by the brain. (He's written elsewhere on even broader topics.) Here, he concentrates on how that process is illuminated by the study of irregular verbs and nouns. (Consider your average dictionary, packed with verbs; you might be surprised (as I was) to learn that only a couple of hundred of them are irregular. Seems like more.)

Pinker argues, based on his research, that "language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules." This is contentious, but Pinker does a good job defending it. Still, it's worth remembering that he's not a dispassionate observer.

As usual, Pinker tells his story with verve, clarity, and occasional humor. (He likes to illustrate points with relevant newspaper comic strips.) I laughed out loud at this, after he's described one of his research studies apparently carried out in a University-attached community:

We also wondered whether the effect might be a fussy affectation of pointy-headed, Volvo-driving, endive-nibbling, chablis-sipping young urban professionals.

Pinker does get down into his research weeds occasionally; I don't know how many readers will be interested in exactly how a subset of Hungarian irregular nouns get declined differently when they are used as proper names. But this is proceeded by a pretty good joke ("That fact, combined with the disproportionate number of Hungarian mathematicians and scientists, led one physicist to suggest that Hungarians are a advanced race of space aliens, but that theory is no longer widely believed.") Readers can pick and choose what to delve into and what to skim over.

The edition I am currently reading has a hideous '90s purple and orange cover--so that's a downside.

I've found this to be the most philosophical of the linguistics books I've been hoarding lately . . . a good thing so far. Will update when I have the stamina to finish. Since it's not a novel, I've been reading chapters of this, going back and forth to later works . . . a quite enjoyable way to take it all in. The part on causation has blown my mind thus far. First chapter sort of boring.

Steven Pinker's work is generally very readable, and so he has become something of a champion popularizer of linguistics and all the fun, quirky, nifty tidbits of knowledge that come with the field. Unfortunately, he also does two things that annoy the hell out of me:

1) He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view,

and

2) He had one good idea a few decades back, and has proceeded to spin it out into a small cottage industry involving a number of volumes and essays; in reality, he wrote one book six or seven times.

Words and Rules is, in my mind, the most fun of the lot, mainly because it introduces some pretty fundamental linguistics concepts in clear, accessible language and effectively blows the mind of the lay reader. What could be better than that? Other books, like The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate delve more deeply into his affiliation with Noam Chomsky's ideas of Universal Grammar and the innate human tendency toward language production, or the dubiously named/conceived "Language Acquisition Device." I recommend these latter two only in conjunction with critical, post-Chomsky work on universalism and language development.

A good cerebral masturbation.

This is a book primarily about the processes by which our mind manages the use of both regular and irregular forms of the past tenses of verbs, and manages the formation of plurals of nouns. Eight (of ten) chapters cover these processes in engaging detail. Steven Pinker fills the book with interesting insights which generally prevents the subject matter from becoming overly dry to someone without a technical understanding of the study of language.

Steven Pinker is a man with a lively mind who clearly loves language - especially English - and champions the common man's speech against purists and language mavens everywhere.

I had a harder time tracking with this book than with the other two I've read (The Language Instinct and The Sense of Style), but that's mostly due to my own dullness of mind. Even if I can't reproduce his main arguments, I still enjoyed the author's cheerful tour through wug-tests, bahuvrihi compounds, pluralia tantum, the history of English irregulars, and rationalism versus empiricism in philosophy generally.

This book covers two unassuming grammatical forms, the past and plural tenses. By examining almost exclusively these two parts of grammar, Pinker surveys the history, successes, and failures of two schools of thought with regard to how we (humans) learn and use language.

The connectionist model, which uses artificial neural networks to learn conjugation by studying patterns in an input set of known words and use this to predict the conjugation of new words. Pinker says this fails because the neural networks lack the ability to use variables, necessary to mimic the human habit of recognizing the important features of a new word, such as the head and tail.

Chomskyan model of universal grammar. Pinker shows how this model can't predict interesting features of the plural and past tenses, such as irregular verbs and the learning curve children undergo when they start to understand and use conjugation instead of merely repeating words.

In Pinker's "Words and Rules" theory the human brain under certain conditions, such as remembering an irregular "word" will suppress the conjugation "rule" that would otherwise cause output of the word interpreted as though it were regular instead of irregular. It also explains those mysterious features of language acquisition because the rules are developed after words. It also treats words as complex objects with a "head" and "tail" which govern how we choose to conjugate.

Pinker uses this theory to shed light on some misguided pedantry, defending the names of the Toronto "Maple Leafs" or the fictional monster "Mice-eater".

Not my favorite Steven Pinker book.