I recently spent an enjoyable few days reading Words and Rules by Steven Pinker, which looks in detail at the formation of regular and irregular forms in English, when they're used and why, and what that might mean for how humans organize information in our brains. One of my friends says she read a quite scathing review, suggesting that Pinker's scholarship doesn't hold up if you have any special knowledge of linguistics. It's hard for me to see the gaps, since much of the book is given over to literature reviews, by which I mean that Pinker describes and evaluates the existing scholarship, and that hardly seems controversial. So far as my knowledge of linguistics extends (which is medium far), he is accurate.
His psychological claims didn't strike me as especially earth-shaking, either, though that may very well simply be my ignorance. The book struck me as a fairly straightforward introduction to one aspect of linguistics, how word forms are adopted, change, and drop out of use. One Paul Wood, who clearly has more linguistics than I do, agrees, writing that Pinker is "re-inventing the wheel." Pinker is a lively writer, and this is a good introduction to some aspects of how language works, written with clarity and humor.
Posted by Su Penn at August 4, 2003 05:27 AM | TrackBack