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Words and Rules:The Ingredients of Language - Part Two

© Sandra Linville

In his book, Words and Rules, Pinker writes that "language works by words and rules, each with strengths and weaknesses. Irregular and regular verbs are contrasting specimens of words and rules in action. These are the themes of this book, but with many twists to come. It would be too good to be true if we reached a major conclusion about the most complicated object in the known universe, the human brain, simply by seeing how children name pictures of little birds. The word-and-rule theory for regular and irregular verbs is an opening statement in the latest round of a debate on how the mind works that has raged for centuries. It has inspired two alternative theories that are equally ingenious but diametrically opposed, and intensive research showing what is right and wrong about each of them perhaps resolving the debate for good. The theory has solved many puzzles about the English language, and has illuminated the ways that children learn to talk, the forces that make them alike, the way that language is processed in the brain, and even the nature of our concepts about things and people. But to reach those conclusions we first must put regular and irregular verbs under a more powerful magnifying glass, where we will find some unexpected fingerprints."

This book is full of unexpected zigs and zags and for people who are fascinated by words and language, it is especially rich with information. For example, Pinker includes discussions about Ferninand de Saussere, founder of modern linguistics, sound symbolism, Jorge Luis Borge's story, "The Library of Babel" and Umberto Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language", spoonerisms, how to pluralize nouns, suppletion which arises from merger of two words, how English has evolved from Chaucer to Shakespeare and beyond and why lightning and not lightninging. The book includes facts such as "by the time they enter school, children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number."

And if you are not a baseball fan, you will learn that it is appropriate to say the batter who hoisted a can of corn (old term for a high, lazy fly ball) to the center field "flied out", not that he "flew out."

Steven Pinker was born September 18, 1954 in Montreal, Canada. He received a bachelor of arts in psychology at McGill University, Montreal in 1976 and a doctor of philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979.

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