Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language

Front Cover
Basic Books, Jul 14, 2015 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 384 pages
"If you are not already a Steven Pinker addict, this book will make you one." -- Jared Diamond

In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explores profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple phenomenon -- regular and irregular verbs -- and examining it from every angle. With humor and verve, he covers an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities, from the history of languages to how to simulate languages on computers to major ideas in the history of Western philosophy.

Through it all, Pinker presents a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules. The idea extends beyond language and offers insight into the very nature of the human mind.

This is a sparkling, eye-opening, and utterly original book by one of the world's leading cognitive scientists.
 

Contents

The Infinite Library
1
Dissection by Linguistics
21
Broken Telephone
47
In Single Combat
83
Word Nerds
121
Of Mice and Men
147
Kids Say the Darnedest Things
189
The Horrors of the German Language
211
Digital Mind in an Analog World
269
Glossary
289
Notes
297
References
313
Index
335
About the Author
2
About the Book
6
Suggested Reading
19

The Black Box
241

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2015)

Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, studied experimental psychology at McGill University and Harvard University. He is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker conducts research on languages and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and the New Republic, and is the author of several books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, and most recently The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Bibliographic information