Words and Rules (Science Masters) |
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 | Steven Pinker has a very good ear; you know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules, Pinker picks apart our language to reveal pro found truths about how we think. Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense. English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tenses that look like the present-tense verb with "-ed" on the end--today I walk, yesterday I walked, etc. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular past tenses follow no rules--today I buy, but yesterday I bought; today I hold, yesterday I held. The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by ... read more.
Written by Steven Pinker.
Published 28 October 1999.
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
rrp £14.99.
176 pages Paperback.
ISBN: 0297816470
ISBN-13: 9780297816478 | |
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