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Words and Rules (Science Masters) (Paperback)

by Steven Pinker (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (28 Oct 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0297816470
  • ISBN-13: 978-0965437462
  • Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 14.7 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 438,732 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
Steven Pinker has a very good ear; you know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules, Pinker picks apart our language to reveal pro found truths about how we think.

Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.

English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tenses that look like the present-tense verb with "-ed" on the end--today I walk, yesterday I walked, etc. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular past tenses follow no rules--today I buy, but yesterday I bought; today I hold, yesterday I held.

The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving this is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.

It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon Ings --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Amazon.co.uk Review
At least until very recently, the human brain was a black box. The only way we could see how it worked, was to look at how people acted--and listen to what they said.

Steven Pinker has a very good ear. You know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules,Pinker picks apart our language to reveal profound truths about how we think.

Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.

English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tense forms that look like the present-tense verb with -ed on the end. Today I walk,yesterday I walked. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular pasts follow no rules. Today I buy, but yesterday Ibought. Today I hold, yesterday I held.

The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving it is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.

It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon Ings

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3.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Narrower than 'The Language Instinct' but thought provoking, 1 Dec 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language (Science Masters) (Paperback)
This is probably of less interest to the general reader then the deservedly popular "Labguage Instinct" in that it concentrates attention nearly all on regular and irregular verbs. However it still includes many very fascinating ideas about language and the brain and how they both reflect the nature of reality.

Pinker's basic premise is that the brain has the two different ways of working expressed in the title of the book- words and rules. In showing why he thinks the observed data are best explained by this dichotomy he covers the history of language, how language is processed by the brain, and two opposed theories of language: Chomsky as opposed to the distributed parallel processing model - see it is a little technical!

I am glad Pinker explains Chomsky because I am sure I would never be able to read him myself, even though I studied language at university. I also enjoy the way he writes, which is often funny, and hardly ever dull; and I find his scientific method and views on language and other matters to be both dispassionate and revealing.

I am hoping he will soon publish something else equally or more interesting.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A godsend, 25 Jan 2007
By J. Patterson (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language (Science Masters) (Paperback)
This is a truly brilliant book, in terms of both content and form, which should be in every library. Steven Pinker has the marvellous idea of presenting language and linguistics in the round by concentrating on all the different aspects of regular and irregular verbs. So you get both breadth and depth at the same time, oh so rare in pop science books. Essential for anyone who wants to understand -- and really understand -- language a little more.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Laboured presentation of a limited subject, 4 Aug 2004
By I. Viehoff "iviehoff" (Chalfont St Giles, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language (Science Masters) (Paperback)
I was very impressed by the Language Instinct and the Blank Slate, but this book was not a joy to read.
Essentially, the material (how humans acquire facility in a language with its perverse mix of rules and exceptions) is only sufficient for an extended essay. Pinker stretches it to book length with large amounts of anecdotally presented "experimental data" on how people make judgments on rules and exceptions, especially in relation to noun plurals and verb past forms in English and German. These anecdotes are far too slow and repetitive to be entertaining, and in general the material could have been considerably condensed to great benefit.

Ultimately the book is unconvincing, because it is far from clear that conclusions based on the behaviour of English and German speakers would generalise to speakers of highly inflected languages, or speakers brought up on a non-inflected languages. Furthermore, the English of the book is US English, and some of the author's conclusions on specific points are contradicted by usage in other major dialects of English.

The writer foolishly tries to take the high ground on usage of Latin and Ancient Greek loan words, and, through imperfect knowledge of those languages, commits several solecisms (or at least would be considered solecisms on this side of the pond).

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars back to his best
This book is a return to form for Steven Pinker after the somewhat disappointing 'How the Mind Works'. Read more
Published on 5 Jan 2002

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good indeed
An intelligent marriage between detail and simplicity of style. Pinker takes us on a tour of language and attempts to explain how it works through the existence of regular and... Read more
Published on 30 Aug 2001

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