This was locally interesting. That is to say, each page had interesting material---he’s a very good writer---but it wasn’t really a page-turner.

The big idea is that it’s not clear how we can all keep in our minds which past tense verbs are regular (just add “ed”) or irregular (like go/went, sink/sunk, etc). A reasonable theory is that we have these general rules (like add “ed” for past tense), and we also memorize particular words.

He attacks this from every which way: brain chemistry, how children learn, how it works in other languages, active experiments performed on native speakers, how it works for (regular and irregular) plurals. But it never quite seems like a book-length whole.

Ego, thy name is Steven Pinker. That about sums up my thoughts on this book. I found his narrative to be dismissive of all other opinions but his own. He was condescending in his argument and his thesis could be summed up as "Once you agree with me, you will be correct."

On more specific issues, I think he saw languages as developing internally, i.e. more monolithic, and not being influenced as much by exterior forces. Later on in the book, he does discuss the impact of immigration and conquest, but he never goes back to reanalyze his original thoughts on the topic. His thoughts on systems and rules also bothers me a bit. He sees rules as the governing "meme", and thus his experiments look for these rules and he interprets the results to validate his thoughts, without convincing the reader, i.e. me.

Further, having been a computer scientist and anthropologist, I find his thoughts on neural networks to be trite and superficial. He dismisses them based on the simplest version of neural networks conceived in the late 80s/early 90s. Neural networks, the more advanced ones, basically are doing pattern recognition, regression and principal component analysis. If you accepted his reading of this technology, you'd dismiss it as alchemy and never look at it further.

I also found his work kind of aristocratic as well as Boomer-eqsue. His assumptions about cultural experiences definitely ties him to a privileged, white upbringing.

Overall, if he'd written a book that focused less on trying to inflate himself and dismiss others, he might have had more converts, or at least an engaged readership. Frankly, this style of writing is indicative of the academy and serves no purpose other than to elevate Mr. Pinker to his pedestal.

“Cats and dogs.” Say the phrase, and note that the -s in cats is pronounced s, while the -s in dogs in pronounced z. Welcome to the strange and sometimes wacky world of linguistics, where things are regular until they’re not; where some irregular words were regular once upon a time but we have forgotten the rules that made them regular; where regular English verbs have four endings but are used seventeen different ways. For example, in open/opens/opened/opening the -ed suffix is used for past tense (It opened.), perfect participle (It has opened.), passive participle (It was being opened.), and verbal adjective (A recently-opened box). Even so, consider yourself lucky, “The verb in Spanish or Italian comes in about fifty forms: first, second, and third persons, each singular and plural, each in present, past, and future tenses, each in indicative, subjunctive and conditional moods, plus some imperative, participle, and infinitive forms.”

The book looks at how we process vocabulary and grammar, and uses research and some cleverly designed experiments to illuminate the techniques the mind employs to recall stored words and apply rules for regular and irregular nouns and verbs. The first three chapters are a primer on the basic concepts of language; they are well written, easy to understand, and form a good base for the rest of the book. Chapter 4 is about theories of language. The two most common are a connectionist model, which uses artificial intelligence to try to establish rules that can then be applied to new words, and the Chomskyan model of universal grammar, which holds that the brain is hard-wired for certain language constructs such as nouns and verbs, along with a rule set for using them.

Chapter 5 discusses how we use language in real time. For instance, “The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener’s brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second.” There are only between 150 and 180 irregular verbs in English (depending on how you count), and no new ones have been added in recent decades. Interestingly, though, the ten most common English verbs are all irregular: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get. Experimental evidences indicates that the mind memorizes the irregular forms, but applies standard rules for the regular ones, e.g.: adding -s for plurals and -ing for participles.

The sixth chapter is the most fun. It would not seem that an extended discussion of noun and verb phrases would be interesting to anyone except a linguist, but in fact it reveals some amazing bits of information at the intersection of language, culture, and history. In baseball, for example, why do we say, he “flied out” instead of he “flew out”? There is a reason, and the author does a good job explaining the factors involved, unraveling them across successive stages of meaning. (For that matter, why do we say “unravel,” when it means the same as “ravel”? Hmm.)

Chapter 7 deals with how children acquire language.

Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.

The neuroplasticity of a young child’s brain is remarkable, as they internalize grammatical rules and add vocabulary, moving quickly from individual words to verb and noun phrases to full sentences by the age of five, while continually picking up and incorporating new words and expressions.

Chapter 8 is an amusing discussion of the German language. Anyone who thinks that German is logical and methodical has been watching too many World War II movies. The language is wildly irregular, in a way that makes English look like a model of clarity. “Of the thousand commonest verbs in English, a majority, 86 percent, are regular, but of the thousand commonest verbs in German, a minority, only 45 percent, are regular.” In English almost all plurals take -s, but in German there are five different plural suffixes, plus three more ways to make plurals that use umlauts.

Chapter 8 looks at what happens when things go wrong in the language centers of the brain, through accident, injury, or genetics. As always, deficiencies can be studied to show how healthy brains process language. CAT scans of the brain show which areas light up under different circumstance. Not surprisingly, the brain spreads language skills over multiple areas, exactly the way one would predict from evolution’s undirected approach, where it can only apply natural selection to what already exists, and cannot anticipate future developments.

The book was published in 2000, so it is likely that some of its assertions and hypotheses have now been superseded by additional research. More precise brain scanning equipment, along with additional studies and experimentation yields new insights and better theories. Nevertheless, this book is still a good introduction to how language works. It is written in a non-technical manner, and is full of remarkable insights into how we string together thoughts and create meaning.

Finally, there were a number of interesting passages that I highlighted that did not seem to fit anywhere else in this review, so I am appending them here:

- Irregular forms are relics of history. They fall into families because originally they were generated in matched sets by rules, but the rules died long ago and the families have been disintegrating ever since. Vowels drift, consonants get swallowed, words lose their popularity, dialects break apart or coalesce. After centuries or millennia irregular forms are no longer the orderly outputs of a rule, nor are they a list of unrelated sounds; they are a family resemblance category.

- three irregular plurals take the old Anglo-Saxon suffix -en rather than -s: child—children, ox—oxen, brother—brethren

- that is how we got the strangest plural in Standard English, children. Once it was childer, with the old plural suffix -er also seen in the German equivalent Kinder. But people stopped hearing it as a plural, and when they had to refer to more than one child, they added a second plural marker, -en. Today many rural and foreign speakers still don’t think of children as plural, and have added a third suffix, yielding the triply plural childrens.

- Today the old [stressed -ed] syllabic suffix survives in a handful of adjectives: accursed, aged, beloved, bended (in the expression on bended knees), blessed, crooked, cussed, dogged, jagged, learned, naked, ragged, wicked, and wretched.

- [A small number of English plurals] change their vowel instead of adding -s: man-men, woman—women (pronounced wĭmɨn), foot—feet, goose—geese, tooth—teeth, mouse—mice, louse—lice

- In English they can sound the same—[the infinitive form] to open and I open—which disguises the fact that they are different versions of the verb. In other languages the form of the verb that you look up in a dictionary cannot be pronounced. For example, in Spanish you can say canto, cantéis, canten, and so on, leaving cant- as the stem, but you can never say cant- by itself.

- The third-person singular -s, as in Dog bites man, steps aside for irregular forms in only four verbs: be—is (not be’s), have—has, do—does (pronounced dŭz), and say—says (pronounced sĕz). These, by the way, are the four most frequent verbs in the English language.

- It should be “Fellow octopuses.” The -us in octopus is not the Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot). The etymologically defensible octopodes is not an improvement.

- The participle ‘has got’ is British, ‘has gotten’ American. As with many differences between the dialects, it was the Mother Country that corrupted the mother tongue; gotten was the form used in England when the first colonists left in the seventeenth century, and the Americans preserved it while it vanished in the British Isles.

- Old English, spoken from about 400 to 1100, had three verbs for be: beon, esan, and wesan. They probably differed in meaning, with beon referring to permanent states and the other bes to temporary ones. (The distinction is similar to the one in modern Spanish between ser and estar: Yo soy Americano [I am American], a long-term trait, contrasts with Yo estoy contento [I am happy], a temporary state.)

- Beon supplied the base form be; esan supplied am, is, and are; wesan supplied was and were.

- Many people have to be reminded that there is no such thing as a kudo: The noun kudos is singular, from the Greek word for glory.

- English has about twenty-five irregular verbs that don’t change their forms in the past tense, such as cut, set, and put. These verbs are ambiguous between past and nonpast: On Tuesday I put the trash out could mean last Tuesday, next Tuesday, or every Tuesday.

Readable and interesting, which is pretty good for a book about language, grammer, and syntax. I'd give it a 3.5 if I could.

WARNING: IF YOU THINK NON-FICTION SHOULD BE READ BLIND DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW

The book is well constructed and highly informative. The aim of the book goes beyond regularity and irregularity in languages i.e. regular = cat-cats, walk-walked; irregulars = foot-feet, sing-sang-sung. Pinker is attempting to discuss and prove, with overwhelming evidence supported by scientific research, his theory of Words and Rules. Words and Rules here implies Memory and Rules.

Throughout the first sections of the book, Pinker introduces bases and premises, more-or-less, for contemporary linguistics, at least i.e. what are irregulars, the recursiveness of language, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. simply for the reader to know.

Later he discusses other proposed theories that attempted to explain regularity and irregularity in language. From Chomsky and Halle's perspective (Generative Phonology), and Rumelhart and Mcclelland's perspective using the associative model (connectionist). He will show the instances in which the two approaches fail. In most cases the connectionist approach fails to deal with regulars and does fairly well with irregulars (more-or-less). And the Chomsky and Halle's All Rules approach is the mirror image of the aforementioned; well with regulars, with irregulars not so.

The Words and Rules theory combines both approaches. It states that irregulars are memorized, and regulars are not so much. Regulars rely on rules almost exclusively. Of course, the memory is accessed, Pinker states, in cases in which words are commonly used instead of going through a whole new computational procedure every time one wants to use a word.

The distinction between memory and rules will be evidenced by experiments such as priming tests, wug-tests, etc. On subjects such as children, agrammatics (patients that are incapable of using grammar rules), anomatics (patients who have difficulty naming objects), etc. And will also explore brain activity using modern technology fMRI, MRI, PET (abbreviation which I admit, cannot recall what do they abbreviate) which might help Pinker state the case that V patient with damage to their Y area has difficulty using irregulars but not regulars, and X patient with damaged Z area has difficulty in using grammar but not using irregulars.

At the end, he claims the parallel similarities between words and evolutionary speciation. And that the mind operates by the Classical (Aristotalion) categorization and the modern family resemblance categorization; which corresponds with his Words and Theory model of operation. In his third to the last paragraph of the book he states it thus:

"We have seen that much of the richness of language comes from the tension between words and rules. In the same way, much of the richness of the public sphere of life come from tensions between family resemblance categories built from experience and the classical categories defined by science, law, or custom".

To know how these two ideas are in harmony with one another, one must read the book.

Pinker's writing is always pleasant and smooth flowing, especially for an academic, and he has the ability to breath life into what would be stale topics otherwise. However, I haven't found his linguistic work as captivating as his work in psychology and human development.

The next time a zoologist discovers a new species of bird, they should name it a "wug" just to troll the linguists.

I've read most of Pinker's major works of popular science - this was the least enjoyable but also probably the most important of the lot. It's certainly not a seamless read unlike some of his other works but it is just as important as anything he's ever written. You get some insight into why an understanding of language may be the key to understanding the mind and some aspects of human nature.

With the exception of perhaps some snippets from the studies of patients with physical brain damage, we currently have no real understanding of how language manifests itself from the mind. Despite this, various theories have been posited about how language may be structured in the brain - and this book is essentially a summary of the detective work that has been pursued by Pinker and others in terms of finding the smoking guns of one such specific theory of language, namely that there are modules which generate some of our language from memory look-up appartus and other modules which generate language from rule-making apparatus.

That might sound fairly banal but, if the theory is true, the implications are profound (language is innate and built into our DNA, for example). And in this book, Pinker essentially tells us why he believes that the theory is likely to be true.

If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Instinct (though it may be some other books have filled in some gaps in my knowledge before this, in the interim).

Pinker’s work is reasonably easy to read and well-illustrated with examples; he’s very convincing in the way he sets forth his ideas, which does make me rather tempted to find someone who disagrees with him equally convincingly and see what I think after that. Any ideas, friends?

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.

Words and Rules; The Ingredients of Language; Stephen Pinker, Basic Books 1999

Reviewed by Graham Mulligan

The subject of this book is regular and irregular verbs. Everyone leans their native language in roughly the same way; lots of words and concepts assembled together following patterns and rules. People don’t just “blurt out words but rather combine them into phrases and sentences. So, what’s the issue with the verbs? Most of them (the regulars) behave similarly, for example add ‘ed’ to make their action I the past. But irregulars (there are about 150 – 180 of these all together) are really different, for example ‘go’ becomes ‘went’.

The irregular verbs have four particularly important words: ‘be’, ‘have’, ‘do’ and ‘go’ (corresponding to existence, possession, action and motion). These four are the most commonly used in most languages.

Pinker show us a neat diagrammatic way to understand the complexity of language (p.23):

tPhonology

tLexicontMorphologytSyntax

tSemantics

Words, it turns out, should really be viewed as memorized chunks that the mind works with using rules for assembly. Things like idiomatic expressions (‘eat your heart out’ or ‘beat around the bush’), collocations (‘get away’), or clichés ( ‘time will tell’) are easily seen as chunks, but so is ‘walked’ (made up from ‘walk’ + ‘ed’).

Pinker dissects language into individual words, tracing how they have evolved through time. Verbs are particularly informative because they (usually) change from present tense to past tense in ways that can be linked to some past usage or form. The path involves Old English, Middle English, The Great Vowel Shift, Modern English and Americanization of English, as well as related languages like Old German and the Indo-European family of languages, all informing the words current existence. But we don’t need to know that history to use the words.

(Indo-European; Proto-Germanic; West Germanic (Angles and Saxons); Old English; Middle English; Modern English) Other families of languages that come from Indo-European: Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Greek, Iranian and Sanskrit.

But is it so simple? Two competing theories see language formation very differently. Generative Phonology (Chomsky and Halle) describes language change as rule driven. Connectionism or Parallel Distributed Processing (Rumelhart and McClelland) sees associations between sounds of stems and past-tense forms generalized to new words similar to the old words. How do we think? This is an old debate between Rationalists (Descartes) and Empiricists (Hume). Is the mind packed with innate structure or is it a blank slate?

Pinker suggests the study of the past tense can illuminate this debate. Are the similarities between stems and their past tense forms (‘sing’ – ‘sang’; ‘drink’ – ‘drank’) following rules or are past tense forms memorized from some now defunct rule or fossil? Rumelhart and McClelland’s theory (1986) is described as an ‘input’ and ‘output’ model that works like a learning machine with ‘teacher’ input and repetition of the output until the correct form is learned. This is a brain theory using neural networks to explain how patterns of correct forms are then generalized to help learn new words as they are encountered. Going back to the diagram (p.23) this can now be represented as:
tPhonology
tMorphology
tSemantics

without the Lexical box or the Syntax box. This won’t do, according to Pinker, because the theory can describe ‘output’ or how to produce the correct sound (words) but doesn’t explain how the correct word can be recognized when first encountered. “Obviously people do both. Not only can we say ‘walked’, but when we hear ‘walked’ we know in means ‘walk’ in the past”. We learn rules and lexical entities so we can ‘send commands to the tongue’ and ‘interpret sounds coming in form the ear’. The pattern generator theory doesn’t account for verb stems.

Pinker concludes that a modified word and rule theory is closer to explaining this language puzzle, “regular forms are generated by rules, and irregular forms are retrieved from memory; the memory however, is not a list of slots but is partly associative, linking patterns with patterns as well as words with words”.

Diagram (p.118 & 152)

What is the main motor of productivity in language, rule processing or memory associations?

Consider this: a monster that eats a mouse every time he can is a ‘mice-eater’; a monster that eats a rat every time he can is a ‘rat-eater’ (not a ‘rats’ eater). ‘Mice’ is the plural form stored in memory. ‘Rats’ is the plural form from the rule: add ‘s’ to a stem to form a plural.

Ugh, this is SO BORING. I can't listen to anymore 500 item example lists of verb forms that follow such and such rule, not to be confused with the 500 items on the example list of verb forms that follow that OTHER rule.

Since a whole lot of this book (at least the parts I've stayed conscious through) seem to indicate that the rules are intuitive and learned as we go, I'm not quite sure why they need to be spelled out in such infinitely particular detail.

I like etymology and stuff... I picked this up because I thought it would be interesting in a similar way. It is not. So, yep, I'm calling it done on this one.

Steven Pinker's _Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ receives four stars from me based simply on his ability to take a rather dry topic and write about it interesting enough to keep my attention.

I'm unsure why I both this book. I teach language but I'm not much of a linguist. Regardless, I bought it as an audio to help me read it as it tends to be rather dry. I found the reader very good which kept me interested in the text. Pinker's writing is excellent, and he writes so that anyone can understand the science. If you are a student of linguistics, I think this is an excellent book that explains the Words and Rules theory well. If you are mildly interested in this topic, an audio book my be better.