Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

This book is definitely fascinating, and Pinker weaves his sense of humor throughout explanations of why verbs, regular and irregular, are the way they are.

I have long been a Steven Pinker fan. It is great to have a neurologist appear who can explain the workings of the brain in a fairly easy to understand, often humorous and precise way. Words & Rules, though made my head hurt. I felt a little like the rat in Flowers for Algernon: a vague feeling that I might have understood this more easily at one time not too long ago, but boy is this difficult to wade through now. Which is to say I blame myself rather than Pinker. I think it's a very difficult subject and my tenuous grasp of grammar didn't help. Unlike his previous books, an actual understanding of the parts of speech helps here.

That said, delving into the minutiae of how the brain works is ultimately rewarding, even if I only understood maybe 75% of this. Watching vicariously as Pinker et al close in how how we think and talk is truly awesome. I find myself paying close attention to how I speak; how I hesitate in choosing words; what associations I seem to need to find a word or person... . Very cool, though you can probably get sucked into some kind of fugue state if you overdo it.

Still highly recommended, but make sure you're snowed in somewhere and have a lot of coffee.

George

I am a linguist now, but I read this book before I started graduate school and I really enjoyed it! The other reviewers are correct in that it is more dense, but if you are really curious about how inflection and irregular verbs (not to mention coinages such as 'computer mouses/mice' or 'flew/flied out to right field') might work in the brain, I think you might really enjoy it! For those who say it's dull, well it's the fascinating topic that makes it good, not a storyline! It is, after all, an informational book. I recommend it for serious language hobbyists or people wanting to enter linguistics in the future.

I have read both the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, and I'd say this one ranks below both of those. While the book is filled with very interesting facts about verbs and language acquistion, I found it too long and tedious.. I felt like I was plowing through.

For those wanting to get most of the information from this book and not "plow" - I'd read chapters 1-3 (The Infinite Library, Dissection by Linguistics, Broken Telephone) and then 7 (Kids Say the Darndest Things), and then 10 (A Digital Mind in an Analog World). Readers taking this approach can skim the other chapters to see if they are of interest.

I found Chapter 7 to be the most interesting, as I have a young two year old acquiring language. Naturally, I'd like to have seen that section expanded. That chapter was (to me) the most revealing of the entire book.

In Words and Rules, Pinker manages to condense and tie together an unbelievable amount of research. Reading this book carefully (i.e. really absorbing the densely packed information) and looking up some of its references is probably equivalent to a good undergraduate degree in linguistics.

Pinker has a knack for teasing apart all the different threads that make up a hugely complex subject, exploring each one with arguments and data from different academic currents, and then tying them up again so the reader can form a much better picture of the whole. And that's exactly what he does in this flawlessly well-written book.

The only problem with Words and Rules is its packaging: it's marketed as a popular science book for the general public, but unlike The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, it can probably only be properly appreciated by either serious "language hobbyists" or linguists (I am both).

If you don't have a fairly good background, or at least a serious interest, in linguistics, you'll probably find this book too dense (at any rate, it's definitely not "light reading"). If you're a linguist (pure or applied), here's another real gem from Steven Pinker.