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Title: Words and Rules
Subtitle: The Ingredients of Language
Author: Steven Pinker
Narrator: Arthur Morey
Format: Unabridged
Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-04-15
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 92 votes
Genres: Science & Technology, Psychology & The Mind
Publisher's Summary:
Steven Pinker, author of the landmark best sellers The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate - and one of the world's leading cognitive scientists - offers an eye-opening explanation of how human beings learn and use language in Words and Rules. First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
Editorial Reviews:
"Deliciously erudite." (William Safire, New York Times Magazine)
Critic Reviews:
"A riveting detective story." (Chicago Tribune)
Members Reviews:
Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
Wow - I was not expecting this book to offer so much insight on the human mind.
The book answers a fairly mundane question: do regular and irregular verbs use different brain systems? He says yes. Irregular verbs, such as "go, went, gone" are memorized, like in a list. Regular verbs, such as "walk, walked, walked," are assembled using a ruleadd -ed.
It's not mundane, however, because the regular-irrugular split turns out to be just an example of two systems that are present in everything we do: one works by memorization and association, and one works by abstract rules. Anytime we want to categorize anything (which occurs in essentially any debate or discussion of any kind) we need to understand which system our words are based on. The consequences for how we think about meaning could be far reaching.
You need to slog through a few chapters before this book picks up, so don't let yourself get turned away. Once he starts revealing the hidden reasons behind why we say "mice trap" but not "rats trap" and many other surprises in our everyday speech, it's pretty darn fascinating.
I really appreciate that he gets into neuroscience in the later chapters and doesn't treat linguistics as a humanities fundamentally incompatible with other sciences.
If you're a word or language nerd, you'll love this. If you're just interested in how the human mind works, you might be pleasantly surprised how much understanding human grammar can teach you.
Fascinating insight into language
and fantastic performance. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. Very insightful and accessible analysis of how our minds acquire and use language as well as the nature of language in general. Loved it.
Irregular verbs under the microscope
Who would have thought that you could write a whole book about irregular verbs? Well, Im exaggerating, some of the book is also about irregular noun inflections and a lot of the book describes how we learn the rules of language that tell us when to use irregular verbs versus when to use the regular forms. And at the end theres an expansion from the incredibly narrow and detailed subject of irregular verbs into human intelligence in general, as a way of saying how wonderful our species is to be able to do so many clever things, including mastering the use of irregular verbs.
I like Steven Pinkers books a lot (although I just googled him and Im not crazy about his hairstyle).