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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 association. Proving this 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 Ings
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Here, Pinker explains the mysteries of language by examining a single phenomenon, regular and irregular verbs, from a dozen vantage points. As the story unfolds, the reader is immersed in the evolution of the English language over the centuries, the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics, the simulation of neural networks on computers, the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak, the tragic loss of language from neurological disease, and more illustrations using humorous wordplay. Pinker aims to makie sense of all these phenomena, with the help of a single idea: that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words, and a mental grammar of creative rules. "In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker answers questions about the miraculous human ability called language, and does it in the gripping, witty style of his other bestsellers. Here Pinker explains the myst" Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780465072705
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