The content is super interesting, but each chapter could be about ten page shorter. Each example was dragged on way too long, and this made the book too dense.

The phonology chapters were a slog (largely due to content) and I’m not sure the neuroscience results are still entirely true, as methods continue to be updated and re-examined. But once you get past the phonology, which will take a while, the rest of the book is quite decent.

[ante reading]

The book has some intriguing chapter titles, especially chapter 8 The Horrors of the German Language. Picking up the gauntlet, Dear Sir, Mr Pinker :)
__________

[post reading]

From the preface:

This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.

That’s no mean goal the author has set here. At least he didn’t write “will illuminate”, because that, to me, would have been wrong. Elsewhere, however, the author was not so modest in his utterances. It seems to me that the scientific field of linguistics is not void of some strong headed individuals. In the dispute between Noam Chomsky and his early students one even spoke of n  Linguistics Warsn, an expression I do not like at all. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me much. Language is one of our most valuable possessions and anyone who expresses something about language that does not agree with one’s own opinion must, of course, expect a violent headwind. That’s also the reason why I read this book in the first place. Naturally, as a German native speaker, I instantly felt a little offended by the above chapter title (that is, I took the bait). But I do not want to get involved in any kind of war. In addition, this book is not about linguistics wars at all (well, maybe a little, if your read between the lines).

This book is about – now get this! – Words and Rules. The words are mostly verbs, but also some nouns. And the rules specify how to turn a verb into past tense, or how to build the plural of a noun. Verbs, in English and other languages, come in two flavors: regular and irregular. Building the past tense of a regular verb in English is fairly easy, even for ESLs like me. Just add -ed to the end of the verb and you’re done. The case of irregular verbs is far more outlandish, and therefore much more fun. Pinker, it seems, knows all the irregular verbs, and is obviously happy to mention them again and again. Although the context is different each time, I think the sections and word lists could have been shorted significantly to make for a better reading. On the other hand I learned about some verbs (and their past tense and past participle) which I never experienced before, like to geld or to chide.

Building plurals of most nouns in English is even easier (an kind of boring) than past-tensing regular verbs. Just add an -s. Praised be German in that regard. We have five different suffixes to choose from in order to build the plural of a noun (plus three more if you consider changing of a vowel to its umlaut), and there is no actual ironclad rule that tells you how to do it. This fact about the German language is a welcome confirmation for Pinker of his theory on words and rules which he develops throughout the book. In this respect, the Horror of the German language is quite obviously meant ironic.

The whole book is not particularly exciting to read; the author should work on this, but it is also not too academic or even dry. There are some really funny comments included, newspaper articles he collected over the years, cartoons, and even some jokes. Personally, however, I would have been more satisfied with a shorter text. Unfortunately there are also some typos in here. Of course there are typos in every book, but in case of a work about language that also contains lecture-like sections on splling I found doubly embarrassing.


n  n
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Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is the best linguistics book that I have ever read. In "The Language Instinct" Pinker explains Chomsky's theories and the scholarship that has come out of them in a way that is clear but does not feel excessively dumbed down for the popular audience. Then I read one of his other books "How The Mind Works" which had a number of unsupported assertions and arguments that I did't quite buy and which I disliked almost as much as I liked "The Language Instinct," so I was a bit hesitant when I picked up "Words and Rules," which had been sitting on my shelf for a number of months. This book has restored Pinker to my pantheon. In this book, he systematically sets forth and defends his theory that our brains have two distinct language systems working in tandem -- (i) a dictionary for looking up words and irregular forms from an internal list that includes an inductive processor for finding associations between similar forms and (ii) a deductive rule system that is used for creating the regular default forms of words. The main focus of his argument is the irregular verbs. There is overlap between the two systems with some common regular verbs appearing in the internal dictionary and some rules that apply to the irregulars, but his theory allows him to show how even the exceptions support the general theoretical structure. The main support for his theories comes from psychology experiments that he and others have conducted in word usage, but he also looks at historical language development, development of language in children and neuroscience maps of brain function, all of which provide further support for the theory, and he shows how his theory works across languages, even ones that are distantly related or completely unrelated to English. There are points where his lists of examples and mechanical demonstrations of his ideas become a little tiresome, but with less examples, his arguments would be less persuasive, so I can't fault him too much on that score. It sometimes feels like Pinker is setting up opposing theories as straw men to knock down, and I have doubts about whether he is completely fair and comprehensive in acknowledging the weaknesses of his own theory or the strengths of opposing theories; I saw that as a problem in "How The Mind Works," which dealt with areas where I had a stronger prior knowledge of the competing theories. However, I still came away feeling that this is a fine book that I would strongly recommend to anyone with a general interest in language who wants to know more about linguistic theory.

This is a deep dive into an area I don't know very well, so my opinions are pretty irrelevant. I found this to be a fascinating read, but I can understand why most people would find it somewhat boring. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the minutia of how people form various tenses of verbs, for example, and not just in English but other languages as well. He is clearly arguing from a particular viewpoint, and I don't know enough to judge whether his position would be close to the current scientific consensus, or if there even is one in linguistics, but he does make his arguments clear and persuasive.
The author of the current top review of this book says "He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view" which is just plain wrong. Throughout the entire book Pinker discusses opposing viewpoints in detail, explaining where the fit the data, and where they don't. In fact it's a major portion of the book, for example where he presents connectionist models and their attempts to replicate human behavior with respect to language. It's like she didn't actually read the book.
I found a lot of consilience between this book and another I read earlier this year, "Surfaces and Essences" by Douglas Hofstadter, especially in the last chapter where he discusses categorization, word clusters, and the development of languages. As Pinker puts it "Darwin himself illustrated his key idea - that the similarities and differences among organisms could be explained by their family history - by analogy to how words change in languages." I love it when disparate books tie together like that.

A masterful exploration of language and cognition from the world expert on both, this book explores the processes in the brain that enable us to describe the world around us. Additionally, it sheds light on the history of irregular verb forms. It might be hard to see how an in-depth study of regular and irregular verbs could illuminate so much about how the mind and language work, but after you've read this, you will be puzzled no longer. One of the best language books I've encountered.

I had a lot of fun reading this. The main point is that the language faculty involves both rules (regular verbs) and a lexicon that is mostly arbitrary but still exhibits patterns (irregular verbs). The rules part overlaps a lot with Pinker's other books, esp. Language Instinct. The pattern matching part was really interesting though, particularly his arguments around what things are explained well by a pattern matching model, and what things are not.

It's unfortunate that these general-audience linguistics books always have to perform the ritual of spending 50 pages discussing the -s/-ed phonological rules in English and tediously listing out examples of all the different cases. Words and Rules does it at the very beginning, which I think is the biggest problem with the book. Just skim through it and save your brain energy for reading about the cooler things later on.

it's probably burnout of reading more academic writing but i gave less fucks about what i was reading in this book. it was still good and interesting, and more of the concepts had familiarity to me from the first one that i read so that was nice. i simply don't care that much <3

This book is an educational read about the psychology of language,but is very interesting. I am kind nerdy about my psych. degree and people's behaviors, but this book was very interesting! ;) If you like studying people's behavior, youll love this one.

Always enlightening to see how much research has been done and is being done on anything, much less on something I would have bet my house that was not being studied, in this case regular and irregular nouns and verbs!!!!!!!!! Very informative. It was my second Steven Pinker "Summer course in a book," but it was not up to the import of last year's "Better Angels of our Nature." Still very glad that I read, I mean, took the course!

I found this book somewhat interesting, but also somewhat heavy going. Pinker's thesis, as I discern it, is that we store both individual words and rules for conjugating in our minds, and uses research regarding irregular verbs to support this thesis. Some of the most interesting portions of the book had to do with the way children acquire language; other parts of the book were detailed descriptions of academic studies that I found to be quite dry.

Oh, Stephen Pinker. He's like a factory that produces interesting books on topics that I find curious. In "Words and Rules" Pinker breaks down speech and language processing to almost atomic pieces and explains how each part seems to be processed by the mind as it pertains to the rules of speech. The byproduct of the book is that I'm now more than ever a descriptivist and that I have far too much fun mispluralizing words.

I consumed the audio version and have gone back to get the dead tree version to take advantage of the number of explanatory graphs, trees, and tables.

Every rule we subject our nouns and verbs to receives a thorough scrutiny that alert us to the real rules we use in speech.

Good read.