Words and Rules (Science Masters) Book

At least until very recently, the human brain was a black box. The only way we could see how it worked, was to look at how people acted--and listen to what they said.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 profound 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 tense forms that look like the present-tense verb with -ed on the end. Today I walk,yesterday I walked. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular pasts follow no rules. Today I buy, but yesterday Ibought. 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 association. Proving it is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance. It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon IngsRead More