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Summary: Psycho -emphasis PSYCHO- linguistics for dummies
Review: Go ahead - drive yourself krazy & Read this massive literature review! here's all the evidence that mind creates language using rules operating over symbols vs. connections/dynamical organization. A must have for adherents of computational Hypothesis/neo-nativists accounts of bio-based Language acquisiton device/UG. Rules, argues, Pinker, solves lots of problems - from past-tensing to neologisming. If you love experimental evidence, this is the book for you. (You're probably a graduate student or professor). If you're a regular person who just wants to know about language, you may a have a problem understanding the significance of the arguments. WOrse yet, the material could bore you to death.Yet pinker is valient in his efforts of entertaining while educating.
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Summary: A Valuable Popular Linguistics Book
Review: Having a 25-year-old degree in linguistics, I was pleased to read this book, refreshing my memory on some matters but for the most part showing that the field continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Focusing on a fairly narrow area ("irregular" verbs and also nouns in English and also other languages), the author presents theories to account for this aspect of language, and the experiments which tend to support or refute those theories. Not surprisingly perhaps, his own theories fare pretty well. Since the focus is somewhat narrow, I would recommend that you first read another of Pinker's language books. (The author would probably enjoy MacDonald's "Lilith" if only to add examples of glide/glode crow/crown to his collection of English irregular verbs!)
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Summary: Boxes and Arrows for the next Millennium
Review: If The Language Instinct described Pinker's view of the development of language and How the Mind Works described his views about cognition in general, this latest work details his ideas about the cognitive organization of language. And like his other books, Pinker tries to persuade the reader to agree with his assessment of thingsusing humorous examples, occasionally odd logic, hyperbole, and in this case a 290 page extended example. Pinker believes that the brain's representation of language is rule based - morphology (such as adding -s to a noun to make it plural or -ed to a verb to make it past tense) occurs because a system in the brain applies a rule during language production. During the past twenty years or so, many cognitive scientists have begun to think that perhaps this type of morphology is not rule based at all, but instead occurs because of the specific pattern of connections in the brain. The goal of this book is to convince the reader that connectionism is wrong, and a rule based system is correct. To do this, he talks about irregular verbs; their etymology bastardization by children, idiosyncrasies, and production by non-typical populations. I never thought that irregular verbs and oddly plauralized nouns could be interesting. I was right. This topic is so much more esoteric than his other books, that even his entertaining examples could not overcome either my skepticism or my boredom. After a while you just want to hear something different. Pinker is not reporting a phenomena, and evenhandedly evaluating various explanatory theories; he is presenting one view to be dismantled, and another to be exalted as correct. But giving selective evidence could bias his readers towards his view, and I am not convinced I was given a chance to really evaluate the competing theories. I anxiously await the rebuttal by the connectionist school. If you have read Pinker's popular books before, I can only say that this book is not at the same level. Its scope is much narrower, and its subject matter a bit more technical. That being said, if you love Pinker's way of presenting material, you will not be disappointed. If you haven't read Pinker before, I recommend that you start with one of his other books - they truly live up to their reputations.
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Summary: Very informative
Review: If you read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" already you will probably enjoy reading this book. I think this book is somewhat harder to read, though, because of its topic. This book mainly deals with regular and irregular verbs. Yikes! Irregular verbs are a nightmare for students - especially if they are learning a foreign language. Believe me, my native language is German and I really hated having to learn all those weird combinations like "go - went - gone". Where does that come from? I have to admit that German is not much better - in fact, Pinker deals with the German language in a full chapter. I always wondered why the verbs we most frequently use are so ridiculously irregular. Why not "go - goed - goed"? Wouldn't that be easier? Pinker goes (why "goes"?) through many irregular verbs and explains in full detail where the funky endings come from - it turns out that most of the endings come from old or ancient sources. This part is a little bit dull to read if you're not really thrilled by all the subtleties but it is still very nice to see why the most commonly used verbs are irregular. PS: I fear having read though all the wrong examples Pinker gives scrod up my knowledge of irregular verbs somewhat. I will ask my friends to blame it on him. ;-)
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Summary: Difficult read, one suspects this book is much ado...
Review: One suspects that this book by Steven Pinker is worthy of a long paper, even two, but that it has been extended to book length through repetitive examples. The central insight -- that memorized words and word parts combine with a general set of rules to form the basis of language -- is repeatedly presented by Pinker as new, innovative, insightful. Pinker is a good writer, and his phrase-making abilities do make this mildly fun to read, but given the fact that most of the audience for this book consists of non-linguistic experts, one begins to wonder how much of the self-promotion is justified. Why does every language have a mixture of regular and irregular forms? "Each mixture arises when unique historical events -- conquest, immigration, trade, fads in speaking -- are handled by an unchanging mental tool kit, which contains a frequency and similarity-loving associative memory and a promiscuous combinatorial grammar." (page 229) This says it all -- Pinker goes on to inform us that "the human mind is a hybrid system, learning fuzzy associations and crisp rules in different subsystems". (page 279) These insights are interesting, but I think are far more intuitive than the author would have us believe. I also suspect that the entire book could be reduced to a twenty page article and 40 pages of foot notes. The average reader slogs through the endless grammatical examples and begins to wonder why they need to read so much to learn these excellent points. Linguistics is a discipline of which much is made from fine points. My own bias is that linguistics is at best an informative field, informing broader areas of philosophy, biology, genetics, and sociology. This book attempts to drive many points home while riding the one track, liguistics, and while it does inform, it also bores the reader. This is the sort of book that a better writer cites... and that a reader with general interests can safely skip.
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Summary: worth every penny
Review: Pinker's Words and Rules is, in short, an awesome book worthy of the highest praise (at least, I think so). Although I do not feel I can do it justice here, hopefully I can give you enough of a hint of the book's thesis to get you interested. Pinker establishes from the start that the presence of regular and irregular verbs in all languages can tell us far more than one would immediately think. I must admit that, after reading Pinker's first chapter, I was rather skeptical as to how illuminating this apparently simple phenomenon could be. How can such a commonplace principle reveal some of the most integral components of human mind and language? It was a real pleasure, however, to watch my objections to Pinker's argument fall apart as I read the rest of the book. Briefly, Pinker traces the development of language in children and touches on many original experiments with a wide range of subjects to suggest that there is a discernible structure in our brains that accommodates the regulars and irregulars. Some (the regulars) need only be stored in root form (e.g., to talk) in our memory; our mind can inflect them appropriately (person, tense, etc.) using built-in rules of language (e.g., just add -ed to get the past tense). Other verbs (the irregulars), however, do not follow the rules; all of their forms must be stored in our lexical memory (e.g., am, are, is, was, were; although related irregulars can lead to mini-patterns that help us inflect new verbs that "seem" irregular). These principles are a shadow of the underlying structure of our minds. This is, of course, only a minuscule fraction of the information Pinker covers in Words and Rules. Best of all, he has a great sense of humor and a gift for writing that makes all of his ideas perfectly clear. The "knickknacks" of language he relates are all familiar, and yet he uses them brilliantly to make a strong case for the structure of our mind (not so familiar) that he believes is reflected by the principal of verb regularity and irregularity. Admittedly, Pinker becomes somewhat repetitive at times in this book, but I didn't find these lapses particularly troubling (I got the feeling that he could sense the skepticism that some of his readers would have and tried a little too hard to be convincing). If you have read and enjoyed How the Mind Works and/or The Language Instinct, you will certainly enjoy this book as well (if you have read The Language Instinct, then some of the ideas in Words and Rules will already be familiar to you). If you have not read Pinker yet, this is as good a place to start as any.
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Summary: Losing impetus
Review: Several years ago I read 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker and, despite being an avid and enthusiastic reader of books about language, I was somewhat disappointed - the book seemed to lack drive or insight. These comments, however, are based on an impression which is not fresh in my mind. Hence, when I started reading 'Words and Rules' I had a slightly negative preconception to fight against. But I was surprised. 'Words and Rules' is both entertaining and insightful. It's discussion of the forms of past tense in English - both regular and irregular - gave me a lot to think about. It 'explained' some of those curiosities that I had wondered about for many years - 'slept' but not 'sleeped', and yet both 'learnt' and 'learned' are acceptable. Unfortunately I did become bogged down in the book as Mr Pinker uses more and more avenues of research to support his hypothesis that both words ('slept', 'learnt') and rules ('-ed' as in 'learned') are functional. Anf that rules may be modern inventions gradually displacing the much older irregular forms. From a philosophical point of view this book did make me reflect on how academic research often comes up with two hypotheses and so often both are proved to be partially correct. Even when they seem to be mutually exclusive, such as the wave and particle nature of light. Is it a reflection on the power of the human mind and its ability to support its hypotheses even in the face of opposing hypotheses? If that were the case, Mr Pinker is presenting no case at all. A much more revealing document would be one that took either of the two theories - words or rules - and justified it in exclusion to the other.
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Summary: Frequently entertaining, but ridiculous as scholarship
Review: Steven Pinker presents a clash between his own views about language and those of his (mostly connectionist) opponents. The clash is explicitly labeled as a form of intellectual combat. Unfortunately for the opponents, they aren't really allowed to fight. Their views are perfunctorily summarized by Pinker, who then argues his own views at length. The role of judge and jury in this contest is played by Steven Pinker. And, in the end, the winner turns out to be ... (well, I wouldn't want to give away the ending!).
I read this not long after taking a look at Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin makes his case stronger by giving his opponents every benefit of the doubt, then addressing all the doubts in turn. It's his modesty that makes his work so compelling.
Needless to say, Pinker does have a gift for writing about language and cognitive science in a entertaining way, and (although he's not in as good form here as in his Language Instinct), there are plenty of intriguing bits throughout this volume. The book is not bad as entertainment, so long as its kangaroo-court aspect doesn't bother you.
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Summary: "The irregular and regular beget each other"
Review: The above title is my personal translation and interpretation of the Chinese aphorism: _qi2 zheng4 xiang1 sheng1_ (which originally referred to using a combination of straightforward tactics and deception in war); and it encapsulates what, in my view, this book is all about.
Morphology, or the way words are put together, is a slippery thing to deal with in a scholarly way. Anybody who speaks a language, inherently knows a lot about morphology. We are aware of regularities and irregularities, but are generally at a loss to say much about the things that break a seemingly established pattern (e.g. book, books; but: woman, women) other than to brush them off with a comment like "That's an exception - just memorize it." Many previous works seem to have cherished a desire to stuff morphological patterns into a mold of consistent regularity, expressing disappointment when it didn't work. But in fact irregularities, which themselves often form clusters of regularity, provide us with an intriguing glimpse into the structure of human language and the organization of the brain.
Pinker's main thesis is found in brief on p. 119: "...regular and irregular inflection are psychologically, and ultimately, neurologically distinguishable...irregular inflection depends on *memorized* words or forms *similar* to them, but regular inflection can apply to *any* word, regardless of whether the word is readily retrievable from memory."
Pinker adopts several different angles to gather support for his thesis, including children's grammar mistakes during acquisition of their native language, experiments with nonsense words like _wug_, elicitations of past tenses of verbs and plurals of nouns in German where there is more than one possibility (though I felt the results of these could mostly be predicted before the experiments were run), and comparisons of the past tense and plural forms of idioms vs. non-idioms (e.g. lowlife: lowlifes, not lowlives; and fly-flew-flown, but flied out, when referring to baseball). Pinker makes an interesting comparison of measure word choice in Chinese with the regular and irregular verb and plural form tangle in English. And I found the discussion of the pattern associator model (p. 134-146) enlightening.
I personally wasn't that taken with Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, and I find his smart-aleck writing style grating at times. His metaphors, while colorful, are often barely this side of appropriateness, in my view. But this book is a real tour de force which reflects the long-term, deep, and wide-reaching thought that Pinker devoted to his subject. I think this book should be required reading for anybody studying morphology, or even general linguistics.
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Summary: An Important Dispatch From the Front Lines
Review: This book has some quite interesting things to say about how we speak and, more generally, about how we think. It is a closely-argued defense of a certain position in psycholinguistics - namely that we process language by variously using memorized forms or applying rules. Thus we retrieve from memory the past tense "went" of "go" but figure out by rule the past tense "ambled" of "amble". It sounds obvious, the way I have put it. I'm not sure it is all that obvious: Pinker and those investigators of like mind have taken a middle ground in a heated debate. On one side is Chomsky, who apparently feels that associational operations that allow us, for example, to retrieve the irregular past tense from memory when we have the root word in mind are illusory, that virtually every morpheme (word form) - even those that are seemingly irregular - is evoked by a strict rule from the root. On the other side stand the connectionists, who insist that the brain's "past-tense morpheme-builder", say, is a neural network (of course it is, but they mean one of a particular kind), and that it has learned, during a person's childhood, to inflect words by building connections between input root and output past tense by getting correct versions from parents and others. In this view there are no "rules" that stand outside the network: past tenses are formed by cranking through a vast web of memory that was shaped by the linguistic facts that served to train it. And so, presumably, with other grammatical forms. (I know I have compressed excessively here: Pinker does a better job - and has pictures!) The first part of the book explains and elaborates these positions. Most of the rest of the book is devoted to describing experiments that take advantage of the few verbs in English that are irregular in the past tense and nouns irregular in the plural to tease out those situations in which we apply a rule versus those in which we rely on memory to come up with the appropriate word when we are speaking. If you can understand the previous sentence, then you will have a shot at following Pinker as he gallops off in pursuit of his Grail of Words and Rules. It's not that he is obscure or incoherent (he is an engaging writer with a light touch): rather, he is steeped in this work - has been for years - and tends to forget that the reader is not, and that the reader does not have an endless appetite for slight variations on an experimental theme that may confirm or falsify certain ideas or their competitors. The work Pinker describes is very much part of the current research in brain organization - not only in language performance but, as he makes persuasive, in more general sorts of cognition. It is all in the service of answering a small set of related questions, so the book has the virtue of focus. It has the additional virtue of making clear the linguistic genius of the average Joe or Jane, and further demythologizing the omniscience of the "language mavens" (a service Pinker also performed in "The Language Instinct"). When you are done you will be well-schooled in the English past tense, and probably find yourself more aware of, and in awe of, your everyday linguistic performance. It is, however, one long argument for his theory (although he does not ever formally specify the theory, we get the idea). While it does not provide the numerous epiphanies scattered through "The Language Instinct" or "How the Mind Works" this book does give the reader an excellent feel for how psychology is done these days.
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