Book of the Week: Words and Rules

07 May 2016

words_and_rules This week I read Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker. Pinker examines how language and the mind works by examining regular and irregular verbs. On this journey, you learn about how scientist measure activity in different regions of the brain, how children learn language, different linguistic theories, what we can learn from neural network models and just generally about things you take for granted. As a person who works with language, I wish I read this book earlier. Words and Rules words_and_rules_diagram A word is a memorized association between a sound and a meaning. Rules are productive, symbolic and combinatorial. It doesn’t specify specific things, but how you bring together different kinds of things. You can combine things in any number of ways as long as they follow the rules. There are 6.4 trillion five-word sentences. Not all of them make sense, but you can generate them all based on your words and rules. The rules let you compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the words and how they are combined. Sentences are created by taking a set of memorized words), applying rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words (morphology) and using rules that combine words into phrases and sentences (syntax).

That underscores the power of a rule: It can apply whenever memory fails, regardless of the reason for the failure.

Irregular Verbs

The difference between the two sense of regular—”majority of words” versus “applied as default”—uncovers intriguing aspects of the psychology of language and the history of language, and shows how one can affect the other.

When things follow a set of regulars, they are regular. Not every word follows the rules. These are irregulars. When we learn, we memorize the exceptions. First we check whether or not something is irregular. If it is irregular, then remember what you memorized. If is regular, then apply the rule. You will see children make mistakes when they try to apply the rules to irregular words. The book talks about the history of irregular words, how they came about, how they changed over time and how they are handled in our mind.

How do you pluralize “mother-in-law”? Mothers-in-law or mother-in-laws? Categorizing Definitions

Clinton had treated “sex” as a classical category—a list of anatomical configurations stipulated by the law—and his adversaries treated it as a family resemblance category.

Words are pinned to some meaning or definition. People have in their mind what is more representative of a category. Some things are fuzzy and lie on the border of what you would put in that category. The most representative member of a category is called the prototype. When I say bird, you think of a sparrow or a robin, not a turkey or kiwi. If something matches the same traits as the prototype, you tend to put it in the same category. Our mind abstracts out what a concept of something is. This helps us apply rules and generalize things. Purchase Words and Rules on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.