Life's too short. Just remind me, how many angels can dance on the point of a pin? Why does the fascinating subject of language have to turn into an intellectual battleground....I love words. Perhaps it's rules I don't like.

Had some interesting points that related to my field of speech-language pathology. Overall he harped so much on regular and irregular verbs. Would have been easier to digest if he used bullets for main points in the book.

Teaching applied linguistics for the first time and this book was extremely useful for that. The language frameworks and his approach to breaking them down was particularly accessible to my students.

Although I liked Pinker's other books, I found this one too technical and quite repetitive. I just wanted it to end.

This is a niche example of public-facing linguistics. In his earlier books (especially The Language Instinct, Pinker tried to give an overview of linguistics (from phonetics to syntax to semantics and sociolinguistics), covering various different aspects of language to show how even the most curious trivia can be explained through the discipline of linguistics. To put it simply, this book is primarily concerned with irregular verbs. Why is it that the past tense of "string" is "strung" (and similarly "sting", "stung") but the past tense of "bring" is "brought" and the past tense of "ring" is "rang"? How do speakers know when to add -ed to a verb and when to use an irregular alternative, and how do they know how to form the irregular word? Sometimes the irregular form involves a vowel change (dig-dug, fight-fought, hang-hung), sometimes it involves a devoiced ending (send-sent, lend-lent), sometimes a vowel change and devoicing (keep-kept, sweep-swept) and sometimes no change occurs at all (hit-hit, cut-cut). The same is also true of nouns where English has a default -s marker (bed-beds, car-cars) but also several irregular umlaut nouns (man-men, foot-feet, mouse-mice). While these irregular forms can be explained diachronically by historic vowel shifts, there is no hard-and-fast rule for English speakers today ("shrink" becomes "shrunk" but "think" becomes "thought"). Children must memorize these irregular forms independently.

Pinker is often lumped together with Chomsky as one of the leading advocates of universal grammar but this is not an accurate characterization. Pinker believes that the human brain has an instinct for language, a multi-process computational apparatus spread across different regions of the brain. It is not a preset rulebook of grammatical parameters like Chomsky's x-bar theory. In this book, tackling the specifics of irregular verbs, Pinker shows instead that two cognitive processes are involved in language: the brain clearly memorizes a word and information about it (a root morpheme, its meaning, its grammatical classification, and any irregular form) and then also learns a series of phonological, morphological and syntactic rules (add -ed to verbs to form the past tense, devoice the "d" if preceded by an unvoiced consonant; add -s to make the plural, voice the "s" if the preceding sound is a voiced consonant). The brain retrieves the word but only applies morphological rules if the word calls for it. Chomsky wanted to show that all language production is the result of some pre-programmed principles (e.g. speakers don't just learn that "thought" is the past tense of "think"; the brain has some mysterious root for both words and derives "think" for the present tense and "thought" for the past tense"—a hidden morpheme beneath the surface of daily speech). But looking at both traditional linguistics, as well as psycholinguistics and neuroscience, Pinker shows how the brain produces language through a variety of cognitive procedures working in tandem.

I thought there was a lot of interesting tidbits throughout the book. For example, Pinker develops a lot of argument out of the fact that, in compound nouns, only irregular nouns permit the plural (e.g. we can say "mouse-infested" and "mice-infested"; however, while we can say "rat-infested", it is awkward to say "rats-infested"). This suggested that irregular plural "mice" is not seen as some inflectional derivation of "mouse" but as an alternative root morpheme. Pinker's theory also cogently shows why we produce regular endings for compound words: for many, the plural of "lowlife" is "lowlifes" rather than "lowlives"; the plural of "still life" is "still lifes" and not "still lives"; the plural of "Mickey Mouse" is "Mickey Mouses" and not "Micky Mice". In each of these cases of bahuvrihi nouns, the compound is not technically headed by an irregular noun (a still life is not a kind of life, Mickey Mouse is not really a kind of mouse but a cartoon name), and so the default morphological rules now apply. We can see in our language use how both lexical data and morphological rules work concurrently.

Although written for a general audience, it is a little specialist in topic, but it's a good example of linguistics scholarship which shows how we have an innate understanding of grammar in our brain, rather than Chomsky's hypothetical machine.

Lucid, well-reasoned and filled with fun pop-culture references like Pinker's other books. However, it should have been half the length.

Pinker persuasively sets out his model of how language is represented in the mind. He argues there are two separate functions; namely, (1) memory: where arbitrary words and associated meanings are stored in a mental dictionary; and (2) algorithms for constructing morphological rules.

Pinker focuses on regular and irregular verbs, where irregular verbs are an example of (1) and regular verbs are an example of (2).

Near the beginning Pinker states that he "tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable." So as you might guess, it gets a little exhausting near the end once you've picked up his core argument. I'd recommend reading Pinker's The Language Instinct instead.

This book has a great deal of overlap with Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, which I have previously reviewed on GoodReads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Pinker, considered the world’s leading expert on language and the mind, has created yet another masterpiece that explains our language instinct and how the brain is fitted, through evolution, with mechanisms to understand and produce linguistic constructs. A toddler is far better equipped to talk than to comprehend how various things work in our world. S/he uses a mental grammar—the rules—along with words known to him/her from an enormous collection of words, that is, symbols for objects and ideas. The said toddler is capable of using word-formation rules to invent new words, such as "breaked" and "holded," that s/he could not have parroted from someone else.

Boundless combinations can be created by using a relatively small set of rules and a vast collection of words or symbols. These combinations can be used for communicating with our fellow humans or to create wordplays and poetry. A handful of rules suffice for creating a complete toy grammar. We can recognize a spoken or written word in a small fraction of a second, and we are just as quick in finding a word to name an object.

Pinker devotes much space to the discussion of irregular forms, especially those related to the English past tense. One observation is that irregular forms were originally regular but changed over a long period of time due to errors and distortions in their transmission or to simplify their pronunciation. Newer additions to a language almost always take regular forms and people tend to use regular forms for notions that are unfamiliar or have not been used for a long time.

Pinker presents his ideas in 10 chapters.

- The infinite library

- Dissection by Linguistics

- Broken telephone

- In single combat

- Word nerds

- Of mice and men

- Kids say the darnedest things

- The horrors of the German language

- The black box

- A digital mind in an analog world

One common criticism of this book, and some of Pinker’s other works addressed to a general audience, is that he does not give other viewpoints much weight, leaving the reader with the impression that his theories are generally accepted and noncontroversial. This is far from being the case for language-acquisition ability, where competing theories are still being hotly debated.

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I didn't hate this book or anything - Pinker is normally an engaging writer. It's just that I found it a little too abstract and sciencey-wiencey, and all of the morphology and charts gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to my days as an Applied Linguistics major taking a morphology class and realizing this was not, in fact, the major for me. Those days did help me to define that my interest in linguistics is more in the evolution of words (how did we get from Beowulf to Harry Potter?) rather than the minute breakdown of what our brains are doing when we choose word endings. I know the separate interests are related, but "how we have both hotel and hostel" is more interesting at cocktail parties than "these are the circumstances under which we use -s and -z sounds to make plurals."

I don't go to many cocktail parties, so I could be wrong.

Tedious at times, but overall a tantalising peek at what is happening in our brains.

Guy's got me ready to jump into a career in linguistics. In an age when all you have to do to spit out a bestseller is tack 'Quantum' onto the front of the title, this is real, hardcore, purely magnificent science writing.

Neural networks. Neurobiology. Combinatorial languages. Irresistible. ^_^

A nice introduction for folks who don't know anything about linguistics, with comic strips and accessable comparisons. It won't offer much to the better-initiated, though.