This is a great look into how language works and how the brain works. It addresses pesky questions about language and grammar by showing you how your brain works on language: why do irregular verbs tend to be the ones you use the most, like "to be"? It all has to do with brain timing.

a little lighter than the next book in the series, The Stuff Of Thought; looks at some aspects of regular & irregular verbs as an opening into various aspects of language & linguistics. a lot of fun so far.

This book has taken me months to read, having to stop every few paragraphs to do some thinking (and frankly look up some of the terminology with which I am unfamiliar). Well worth the effort, though, and clarifies linguistic processes in a (generally) accessible and interesting way - oh, and lots of fun cartoons to lighten the intellectual load a little.

A little abstruse and difficult to read at times, in stark contrast to other books i've read by Pinker. Words and Rules provides an excellent overview of some key issues in psycholinguistics by analysis of two ubiquitous components of language; words and rules; memory lookup and symbol manipulation. The book concerns itself with only regular and irregular verbs and the difference psychological systems that belie them. I found it be very comprehensive and appropriately detailed and despite its scope, a great many interesting conclusions are derived. There is some solid neuroscience towards the end and many predictions are backed up with experimental data where possible. Pinker also includes a lot of word-play, etymological searching and cursing of the "language mavens", which was delightful as comic relief. Not as readable as his others, the subject matter is often somewhat technical and laden with jargon, the steps to reach the conclusions are sometimes laborious. Nonetheless, a stimulating read. Would recommend to linguistics students and those interested in psycho linguistics.

Steven Pinker introduces his words and rules theory after providing just enough brush up information to prepare you for it. He then follows up with an onslaught of evidence from a variety of angles to support the theory. To finish up, he marries that theory up with a higher level relationship to the way we think about the world and what we find in it, providing just a little bit of the blow your mind effect. This book makes strong progress in the huge task of figuring out more specifically what is going on in our minds that enables us to command such a powerful tool as language. A masterpiece I expect to be referring to in the future.

Brilliant, witty, challenging, and bright. Pinker illuminates the workings of the mind - and the brain - as he takes a droll romp through the history of our language and the language of our history. (Who would have thought that the Norman conquest would have created our preference for regular verbs?) Sure to whet your appetite for other books by Pinker.

I love Steven Pinker & reading about linguistics topics, but this one got a little dry for me. In essence, "words and rules" refers to a model that represents how the mind learns and recall words. Words are either stored directly with their associated meanings, in a "mental dictionary", or constructed using morphological rules. Pinker delves deeply into the English past tense and concludes that irregular verbs are not remembered in terms of the rules that produce them (such as the rule that produces sleep/slept, weep/wept, keep/kept, etc.), and instead have their past tenses memorized directly.

Jan 2017 Update: I decided to attend the Linguistic Society of America's annual conference in Austin this year to check out the field and what getting a phD in Linguistics might be like. It was EXTREMELY beneficial that I had read this book and had the vernacular to be able to talk with current grad students about it.

I love this book.

This book was highly recommended by a friend after a discussion that touched on linguistics, and I don't think that one could ask for a better popular introduction to the field. Pinker is one of the great minds of our age, and he writes in a very engaging way about the basis of language. We live in a golden age of popular books for linguistics, with Pinker and John McWhorter writing several books (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, etc) in the field and great blogs like Language Log addressing both scholarly and popular items as well.

This book sparked my interest in the area and taught me so much about why we use language the way that we do. I was even able to explain to some of my Arab co-workers why they say some of the things that they do. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who has a curious mind. Even if you don't think that you could be interested in linguistics, after reading this, you very well might be.

When I first read this I found it fascinating, and yery clearly written. The same applies here, though I did not pay as much attention to some of the early sections this time round. I particularly like the ingenious experiments to see how language functions. Having a toddler myself, I can see her making exactly the same errors as Pinker describes.

Steven Pinker never fails to shock-and-awe me, but I didn’t find this book as enjoyable as his Stuff of Thought. The rating of this book would be off-the-chart if I judged it by Pinker’s knowledge of the subject matter, but as a book for a lay reader – it could try your patience. The main subject of the book is the English irregular verbs. Yes, irregular verbs. Pinker uses irregular verbs as an example to build a theory of language and mind in general. I could never have guessed that those pesky irregular verbs could have such fascinating histories and justifications behind them. After a while the discussion gets too detailed and technical and I found it hard to see how those details could explain Pinker’s broader theory of language. Quite an interesting book just for its explanation of irregular verbs, even if you don’t care about linguistic theories.

I'd give this book somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. Let me preface my review by stating I think this is not one to be "read" as an audiobook - I think it would be more beneficial to actually read this book and physically see the words as Pinker goes through the various roots, stems, and theories. The audiobook does apparently come with a PDF, but like most listeners, I sat through the 14 hour audiobook during my commutes back and forth to work, so I stiff-upper-lipped my way through. It is quite a bit more mathematical and analytical than I anticipated and I found the narrative switched between sounding like a dry college textbook and a whimsical Dr. Seuss nonsensical rhyme. This all said, I learned quite a bit (Did you know that you should always say "flied out" in baseball - not "flew out"?) and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of references made to other languages, specifically Turkish. I'd say this is a great investment for a dedicated word nerd.

Covers much of the same ground as The Language Instinct, but from the narrower perspective of the contrast between regular and irregular verbs. The entire book is built around upholding the theory of words and rules; the repetitiveness is unnecessary and gets tiresome at times, but in general the book is informative and should be enjoyable if you liked Pinker's earlier work.