author : Steven Pinker

Do we generate our utterances and recognise those of others by using some deep set of rules? Or do we have a neural network implementing an associative memory look-up? Some linguists argue for one, some for the other. Pinker, in this lucid and fascinating account, argues for both.

I never knew there was so much to regular and irregular English verbs! This is the main example Pinker uses to discover and explain the existence of both mechanisms in our heads. His secondary example is regular and irregular English plurals, and he touches on a wide range of examples from other languages and other parts of speech. His argument is that we use a kind of associative memory dictionary to generate distinct words, including the irregular cases (the Words part of the title), and a rule based system to generate the regular, or default, cases from word stems (the Rules part).

All this is illustrated by a fascinating array of marvelous examples of common speech acts and speech errors, starting from the observation that young children go through an "overgeneralisation" stage where they say things like bringed and putted instead of brought and put, on to more complicated cases like just why the past tense of to ring varies between "ringed the city" and "rang the bell", backed up with statistical evidence from careful experiments. As always in this kind of study, there is an examination of paired brain problems, here Alzheimer's (affecting mostly Words) versus Parkinson's (affecting mostly Rules), and Specific Language Impairment (high intelligence but impaired language skills) versus Williams Syndrome (retarded intelligence but excellent language skills).

The whole treatment is covered in great depth, yet is eminently readable, because it is accompanied by illustrative anecdotes, cartoons, historical insights (why Shakespeare wrote that apostrophe in "star cross'd lovers", and why the events of 1066 means English is so more regular than the closely related German), fascinating little details from other languages (French, Hungarian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, even the "Stone Age" Arapesh), and a light, humorous style (which other writer would illustrate the first person present tense of "to be" with the example sentence "I am the walrus"?). Fascinating, insightful, readable, and convincing.

I'm falling behind -- the rest of the world is writing good stuff faster than I can read it. So, rather than trying to go through authors' back catalogues in order, I'm deciding to skip missed books, and just go to the latest one. Which is a shame in Pinker's case, because he writes beautifully, and has deep interesting important things to say. But, world enough and time.

Here he is investigating the concepts and structures with which we think, in a series of chapters that look at different aspects of the way we use language. So, for example, he looks at certain apparently irregular sentence structures that children learn with little difficulty, even though they can't possibly have heard all the examples, and shows they can be explained by a relatively simple set of underlying concepts of time, substance, having, moving, causing, etc. He looks at metaphor, and the strong claims of Lakoff et al that we think almost exclusively in metaphors. He shows it is more complicated than that. He looks at the way we name things, and how the thing we name is still that thing, even if everything we know about it has changed. He looks at the taboo vocabulary, grammar, and semantics of swearing (including some of the linguistic delights I first encountered elsewhere), and shows that it is more complicated than simple explanations of trying to shock, or to let off steam. He looks at indirect "polite" speech, and again shows it's more complicated than simply communicating directly, or saving "face".

All this is told in a lovely lucid style, liberally peppered with examples, quotations, and cartoons. Amusingly, it has the "which of these shapes is called malooma, which takata?" question that appeared in the immediately previous book I read: here in the context of underlying thought concepts, there in the context of synaesthesia. Everybody gives the same answer: how, given the words are just made up?

The man is clearly drunk on words, be it comprehensive lists of verbs or nouns in various classes, or wonderful turns of phrase in his prose. Just consider the delightful "the Pluto formerly known as a planet". The Stuff of Thought is great stuff.