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This man is a great writer. He explains familiar rules in a way that is not only more interesting and comprehensible than the standard expositions, but also gives you a completely new understanding of what the rule is about.That said, the book is very repetitive.The first three chapters are a very entertaining presentation of the relevant phenomena and his argument about how the mind creates speech. In the following six chapters he presents all of the evidence he can find to support his theory:
This book was challenging, I couldn't even listen to music with lyrics (my usual) when reading it. I read it during breaks from my intensive language course that I'm on and it really helped me think about English and questions that I have for the language I'm learning, just a bit on the heavy side for me. Must read more linguistic books soon.
Ugh, this is SO BORING. I can't listen to anymore 500 item example lists of verb forms that follow such and such rule, not to be confused with the 500 items on the example list of verb forms that follow that OTHER rule. Since a whole lot of this book (at least the parts I've stayed conscious through) seem to indicate that the rules are intuitive and learned as we go, I'm not quite sure why they need to be spelled out in such infinitely particular detail. I like etymology and stuff... I picked th...
I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read). How the Mind Works is quite a difficult, though probably worth it in the end, and The Blank Slate - well, I barely remember any of it now.This is magnificent, particularly on how children learn language and how they make predictable mistakes in whate...
“Cats and dogs.” Say the phrase, and note that the -s in cats is pronounced s, while the -s in dogs in pronounced z. Welcome to the strange and sometimes wacky world of linguistics, where things are regular until they’re not; where some irregular words were regular once upon a time but we have forgotten the rules that made them regular; where regular English verbs have four endings but are used seventeen different ways. For example, in open/opens/opened/opening the -ed suffix is used for past te...
This book covers two unassuming grammatical forms, the past and plural tenses. By examining almost exclusively these two parts of grammar, Pinker surveys the history, successes, and failures of two schools of thought with regard to how we (humans) learn and use language.The connectionist model, which uses artificial neural networks to learn conjugation by studying patterns in an input set of known words and use this to predict the conjugation of new words. Pinker says this fails because the neur...
[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 “w...
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 sc...
The edition I am currently reading has a hideous '90s purple and orange cover--so that's a downside.I've found this to be the most philosophical of the linguistics books I've been hoarding lately . . . a good thing so far. Will update when I have the stamina to finish. Since it's not a novel, I've been reading chapters of this, going back and forth to later works . . . a quite enjoyable way to take it all in. The part on causation has blown my mind thus far. First chapter sort of boring.
WARNING: IF YOU THINK NON-FICTION SHOULD BE READ BLIND DO NOT READ THIS REVIEWThe book is well constructed and highly informative. The aim of the book goes beyond regularity and irregularity in languages i.e. regular = cat-cats, walk-walked; irregulars = foot-feet, sing-sang-sung. Pinker is attempting to discuss and prove, with overwhelming evidence supported by scientific research, his theory of Words and Rules. Words and Rules here implies Memory and Rules. Throughout the first sections of the...
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. ^_^
Steven Pinker's work is generally very readable, and so he has become something of a champion popularizer of linguistics and all the fun, quirky, nifty tidbits of knowledge that come with the field. Unfortunately, he also does two things that annoy the hell out of me:1) He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view,and2) He had one good idea a few decades back, and has proceeded to spin it out into a small cottage industry involving a number of volumes and essays; in realit...
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.
Great book for people like me who are interested in linguistics. Beautifully and humorously written, it considers how our brains might be wired to give us instant and instinctual knowledge of how to properly use grammar. Yes, sometimes we goof, but that is the exception rather than the rule although one would expect far more errors in such an extremely complicated endeavor. Wild guess here, my opinion only: 3 year old kids have a far more sophisticated grasp on language than the most complex AI
Since many reviewers describe Pinker's books as rather readable, I was pretty surprised by the fact I struggled quite a bit with this book. Although the topics of the individual chapters are definitely interesting (my favourite being The Horrors of the German language), Pinker's not an expert at keeping the reader's attention - at least that's the notion I got; mainly because of his borderline obsessive tendency to provide countless, absolutely exhaustive lists of examples, so it almost arouses
If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Instinct (though it may be some other books have filled in some gaps in my knowledge before this, in the interim).Pinker’s work is reasonably easy to read and well-illustrated with examples; he’s very co...
Steven Pinker's _Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ receives four stars from me based simply on his ability to take a rather dry topic and write about it interesting enough to keep my attention.I'm unsure why I both this book. I teach language but I'm not much of a linguist. Regardless, I bought it as an audio to help me read it as it tends to be rather dry. I found the reader very good which kept me interested in the text. Pinker's writing is excellent, and he writes so that anyone c...
Yikes - I went back and forth between two stars and three stars for this but in the end the star ratings said it all. Two stars - it was OK. three stars - I liked it. It was OK and I didn't really like it. This looked like a slam dunk. I loved the Blank Slate, liked Pinker's writing style in that and I eat language books for breakfast but alas this one was not a marriage made anywhere heavenly. I just wanted it to END. Repetition, repeating yourself, which is like saying the same thing over and
This is my first Steven Pinker book. It's written well in that it makes material that could be dry and incomprehensible instead both engaging and able to be understood by someone who is not yet as savvy as she'd like to be about some aspects of linguistics and how language functions in the brain. The book also is organized in a way that its subject matter builds understandably on itself throughout and then extends its fundamental premises about regular and irregular verbs to get at the way the b...
This guy knows way too much about language. Still, he did a good job of compacting complex linguistic ideas into understandable vignettes. His witticisms and use of comic strips helped lighten things up as well. I would definitely recommend Words and Rules for anyone looking for a comprehensive and comprehensible crash course in linguistics.