Words and rules: the ingredients of language

by Steven Pinker

Paperback, 2001

Call number

415

Genres

Collections

Your library, Lingüística

Publication

London: Phoenix, 2001

Description

"In Words and Rules, Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. The phenomenon - regular and irregular verbs - connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to simulate language using computer simulations of neural networks; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the nature of human concepts; the peculiarities of the English language; major ideas in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain."--Jacket.

User reviews

LibraryThing member _Greg

If Steven Pinker's excellent books "The Language Instinct" and "How the Mind Works" inspires you to read more linguistics, this is a good book to read next. This one is more technical and specialized, yet still accessible. Read the other ones first.

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LibraryThing member hippietrail

As long as you're aware that this book is for a more linguistics-specific audience than Pinker's other well-known works, Words and Rules is enlightening and well written.

LibraryThing member Schmerguls

i found some things in this erudite book of interest, but most of it was not well comprehended by me. The blurbs for the book talk about 'a delicious romp through everything interesting about words,' but I did not find it delicious very often, though some of the discussion was of interest. I was

glad when the book ended.

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LibraryThing member briguybrn

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.

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LibraryThing member MLJLibrary

How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That

phenomenon ' the existence of regular and irregular verbs ' connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain. Pinker makes sense of all of this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.

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LibraryThing member INeilC

An interesting history of language. Pinker generally writes in a very engaging way, if at times the technical details.obscure what he is trying to say.,

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