Words and Rules

The Ingredients of Language

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Steven Pinker, author of the landmark best sellers The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate - and one of the world's leading cognitive scientists - offers an eye-opening explanation of how human beings learn and use language in Words and Rules. First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©1999 Steven Pinker. (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"A riveting detective story." ( Chicago Tribune)

A little slow sometimes, but informative!

This book was essentially a slightly different perspective of a class I took in linguistics and cognition.

A Fascinating Listen

A thoroughly well-made exposition of the words and rules theory of language use and learning. Probably because I was already amenable to the theory, I did find it to be a tad over-argued in places. Also, occasionally the lists of examples (which I'm sure worked well in print form) were a bit tedious to have read en totem. These are my only criticisms. the book is generally excellent and certainly well worth the very minor foibles.

Well written but dry topic

Steven Pinker's _Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ receives four stars from me based simply on his ability to take a rather dry topic and write about it interesting enough to keep my attention.

I'm unsure why I both this book. I teach language but I'm not much of a linguist. Regardless, I bought it as an audio to help me read it as it tends to be rather dry. I found the reader very good which kept me interested in the text. Pinker's writing is excellent, and he writes so that anyone can understand the science. If you are a student of linguistics, I think this is an excellent book that explains the Words and Rules theory well. If you are mildly interested in this topic, an audio book my be better.

Word Nerds Rejoice

I loved this book, even in the places where some might say it bogs down with so many rules for words. I'm happy to plod through those parts, because we're talking about WORDS, man, WORDS. This is an excellent resource for anyone who reads in English.

Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.

Wow - I was not expecting this book to offer so much insight on the human mind.

The book answers a fairly mundane question: do regular and irregular verbs use different brain systems? He says yes. Irregular verbs, such as "go, went, gone" are memorized, like in a list. Regular verbs, such as "walk, walked, walked," are assembled using a rule—add -ed.

It's not mundane, however, because the regular-irrugular split turns out to be just an example of two systems that are present in everything we do: one works by memorization and association, and one works by abstract rules. Anytime we want to categorize anything (which occurs in essentially any debate or discussion of any kind) we need to understand which system our words are based on. The consequences for how we think about meaning could be far reaching.

You need to slog through a few chapters before this book picks up, so don't let yourself get turned away. Once he starts revealing the hidden reasons behind why we say "mice trap" but not "rats trap" and many other surprises in our everyday speech, it's pretty darn fascinating.

I really appreciate that he gets into neuroscience in the later chapters and doesn't treat linguistics as a humanities fundamentally incompatible with other sciences.

If you're a word or language nerd, you'll love this. If you're just interested in how the human mind works, you might be pleasantly surprised how much understanding human grammar can teach you.