Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker

Abstract

Basic Books, 1999. £14.99/$26.00 (xi+348 pages)ISBN 0 465 07269 0Pinker is the author of a number of widely read and well-written books about language and cognition. Like its predecessors, Words and Rules makes such entertaining reading that I had to remind myself while reading it that it is a serious book of science, and that the anecdotes, jokes and cartoons in it are there to illuminate points of current research and theory, and not only to entertain readers.Pinker argues that underlying every speech act is a complex mental computation. Hence the most challenging questions about language are not about the sounds that speakers emit, but about the mental operations that are going on in speakers’ heads and about the mental structures that underlie such operations. According to Pinker, the ingredients of human language are of two kinds: every language ‘has a lexicon of words… which are handled by a mechanism for storing and retrieving items in memory. And it has a grammar of rules… which is handled by a mechanism for analyzing sequences of symbols.’ (pp. 12–13).Pinker’s quintessential example of a language rule is the rule for forming the past tense of the regular verbs of English. This rule adds the suffix /-d/ to the stem, as for example in play – play-ed, jog – jogg-ed. Irregular verbs – such as sing – sang or buy – bought – obviously do not use this rule. Instead, according to Pinker, for each irregular verb the speaker memorizes in addition to the basic stem also its past tense form. This treats all irregular verbs alike. (Reservations about this treatment are registered below; see also Embick and Marantz1xCognitive neuroscience and the English past tense: comments on the paper by Ullman. Embick, D. and Marantz, A. Brain Lang. 2000; See all